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Taxpaying voters should absolutely get to decide what tax money is spent on. If that means trading off academic research against healthcare, why should they not

Taxpaying voters should absolutely get to decide what tax money is spent on. If that means trading off academic research against healthcare, why should they not be able to make that choice? You seem to be for taxation without representation, despite how badly that has worked out in the past. AI is a remarkably poor choice for making this argument by the way, as very little research was being done into AI by academia in the last 20 years. The renaissance of neural net research was primarily driven by Google's Jeff Dean taking an interest in Geoff Hinton's research, and then showing that it could be combined with large datasets to achieve impressive new results. The EU in particular has essentially nothing to do with this: the EU's presence in the AI field is essentially via DeepMind (which will soon be ex-EU). But I suspect if grant money were reined in it'd be primarily in the non-STEM fields. There are a lot of EU grants awarded for things that I doubt anyone would miss much: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/7909787/EUs-secret-400m-for-crazy-projects.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/7909787/... Researchers have unearthed a series of grants issued to schemes deemed “confidential” that have not been subject to outside scrutiny. Taxpayers’ money spent on the projects, many of which have been described as “crazy”, has increased since the onset of recession. The schemes include £145,000 to print 736 postcards that “reflect the current problems in Europe that generate social exclusion” and £166,000 on a street circus project whose aim is to “strengthen international understanding”. Producing the postcards in six EU countries cost nearly £200 per card. Whilst these aren't academic grants specifically, they are indicative of the level of quality control that occurs in systems where tax money is spent without accountability to taxpayers.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
>> Taxpaying voters should absolutely get to decide what tax money is spent on. Why? What other spending matter is put to the vote, like that? I don't know about the US, but in the UK at least, voters vote for a government, then the government publishes a budget. Voters don't get any finer control than that. >> Producing the postcards in six EU countries cost nearly £200 per card. Like you say yourself that has nothing to do with research grants, or generally funds going to science.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

>> Taxpaying voters should absolutely get to decide what tax money is spent on. Why? What other spending matter is put to the vote, like that? I don't know about the US, but in the UK at least, voters vote for a government, then the government publishes a budget. Voters don't get any finer control than that. >> Producing the postcards in six EU countries cost nearly £200 per card. Like you say yourself that has nothing to do with research grants, or generally funds going to science.