3 ms·
Heavily is something of a stretch: the NIH is a fairly small part ($40B) of the federal budget ($1,600B discretionary + another $4,000 mandatory spending). It'
by mattkrause 4y ago
Heavily is something of a stretch: the NIH is a fairly small part ($40B) of the federal budget ($1,600B discretionary + another $4,000 mandatory spending).
It's about 0.5% of the total budget, which works out to about a dollar a week for the average taxpayer. On top of that R&D spending has a huge multiplier: a lot of that money supports small, high-tech businesses, which in turn hire people...etc
- acdha 4y agoI never claimed it was a huge part of the federal budget, only that NIH and NSF provide a large fraction of basic science research. It’s always tricky tracing that to actual treatments but the drug companies tend to fund development of promising candidates from taxpayer-funded basic research more than doing that basic science themselves, and a lot of their R&D goes to tweaking existing drugs which might make them more effective/convenient but definitely protects the company’s margin against generics.