That’s just the broken window fallacy writ large. The positive economic output of the research is counterbalanced by the negative economic output of the taxes p

That’s just the broken window fallacy writ large. The positive economic output of the research is counterbalanced by the negative economic output of the taxes paid. There are certainly worse things to spend tax money on, since there are things that generate no economic output at all, but that alone doesn’t justify it. The fact is that taxpayer–funded medical research is just a subsidy for the pharmaceutical industry. Pharmaceutical companies rake in billions in income from their successful products and don’t really need any subsidies. And you’re right, the NIH is relatively small. A back of the envelope calculation suggests that ending the NIH entirely would raise the cost of developing medicines by less than 10%. There’s no way that’s a crisis. That’s just a slightly different way of doing business.