Three Percent Sounds so Small

Gag me with a spoon.

If you can stand to read the White House propaganda linked above, you will find that, on top of everything else we have already forked out in his first 100 days, our man Obama thinks we ought to devote another 3 percent (at least) of our GDP to research and development...(creating) new policies that invest in basic and applied research, (creating) new incentives for private innovation, (promoting) breakthroughs in energy and medicine, and (improving) education in math and science.


New policies that invest in basic and applied research?? What does our young green president think we have already been doing? Is he trying to make us believe that this country does not already invest massive amounts in basic and applied research? We have colossal government taxpayer money pouring into research already, through NASA, through the Department of Agriculture, through federal grants to a huge number of universities, through NIH. And we have an amazing level of private investment as well in a large range of scientific and technological areas, or as he would call it, basic and applied research. A free market economy excels at investing in the scientific breakthroughs of tomorrow, allowing its people to invest where they see the problems, to find solutions a government could never imagine.


Our GDP was 14.33 trillion dollars in 2008. And Barack Obama wants to spend at least another three percent of that. Three percent never sounds like a lot, but why the heck isn't he man enough to come right out and say that he is talking about 420 billion dollars?? I'll tell you why. Because that is one heck of an unaffordable lollipop and Obama knows that the working, taxpaying people of this country are sick and tired of spending another several hundred billion dollars every time he gets out of bed in the morning. Especially on things like education, energy, medicine and private innovation, for gosh sakes, which we already spend PLENTY ON! We already outspend any other nation on education, but he wants to take more of your money away from you and fritter it away on a problem which can't be solved with more dollars. If more and more money has not fixed education by now, there is little reason to believe that spending more money will bring us results. Breakthroughs in energy and medicine? Helloooooo! We are the most innovative country on Earth with regard to both! It is time to appreciate what we have been doing, and more importantly, it is crucial for Mr. Obama to learn a little something about the country he lives in, and to try to understand HOW we managed to do it.


We elected a very naive young man. He said in his address to the National Academy of Sciences,

I believe it is not in our character, the American character, to follow. It's our character to lead. And it is time for us to lead once again.

Obama seriously thinks we lead because it is somehow embedded in our character? Surely not! The reason we have been leading is that we have a framework which allows our people to live largely government-free, and to do the things which only people (not government) are capable of, including keeping a lot of their money so that they (the people who know best how to spend their own money) can invest it as they see fit and use it to create amazing things. We call that framework our Constitution, and that is what makes us great, not the fact that we are some kind of natural leaders. We are really just like any other people, no better, no more talented, no smarter. It is our framework which allows the individuals of this nation to be all we can be and to create things which are rarely, if ever, dreamed of in more tyrannical or totalitarian societies which control the people through socialistic economies driven by oppressive taxation.

By taxing the people enough to devote an exorbitant three percent of GDP to governmental research, Obama will quickly kill everything which he says he wants to bring about in this country which is already great for reasons obviously unknown to Obama.



Hot diggity damn, if you want Obama's wishlist of inventions to actually happen, you have to let the money and the rule-making stay with the people. Only the people, using their own money and resources, and free of onerous government regulation and control, can create what the current leader of the (current) free world says he wants, things such as

solar cells as cheap as paint; green buildings that produce all the energy they consume; learning software as effective as a personal tutor; prosthetics so advanced that you could play the piano again; an expansion of the frontiers of human knowledge about ourselves and world the around us.

Bureaucrats will never make any of the above happen. No one can legislate genius into existence, no one can collect enough tax to force people to create clever things. No one can make government large enough to bring the world to perfection. Not even Obama.

If we want to keep advancing as a nation we have to keep reminding Obama and all the congress people who seem so very much in love with him, that governments don't create. Only people create. And the government has to be kept very small to allow the people to blossom. The best way to create new incentives for private innovation is to leave the resources in the hands of the individual and never let government get its grubby hands on them!