From a Science article:
Already braced for a tight 2006 budget, the National Science Foundation (NSF) got some disappointing news yesterday from a Senate spending panel that voted less money for the agency than even the president’s stingy request.
…
The spending panel delivered its most decisive blow to Brookhaven National Lab’s Rare Symmetry Violating Processes (RSVP), a high-energy physics experiment to look for effects beyond the Standard Model. Calling increased cost estimates to keep the project going “unacceptable,” the Senate panel withheld not only the $42 million requested to start building RSVP in 2006 but also some $14 million already given to RSVP planners but not yet spent. To add insult to injury, the appropriators told NSF that any revised version of the project would have to go back to square one in an approval process that typically takes several years.
The NSF budget is around 5.5 billion dollars. Spending on the Iraq war now tops $170 billion dollars which works out to funding NSF for 30 years. Maybe scientists need to change their tactics. Maybe we should propose that in 30 years worth of research we will be able to invent a device which kills evil people and democratizes nations. I’m just saying.
Unfortunately I don’t know where to get more info on this: maybe the Code Pink website? But somewhere I think you can calculate how much your own town is contributing to the Iraq war. It’s quite amazing even for very small towns, for example a small town in California (again, I can’t think of an actual name… S___) where the public library was being closed due to lack of funding. Community organizers figured out that the town was contributing in the tens of millions for the war in Iraq, and that was one of the major foci of the protest against the library closing (and the Iraq war).
I think the info Suz is referring to can be found here:
http://www.nationalpriorities.org/Issues/Military/Iraq/CostOfWar.html
It is especially astounding to see how much money is contributed from small towns when you consider the lengths those communities go to in order to keep any of their social services afloat. Maybe we should suggest the government hold a bake sale for the war and reallocate the tax funds back to the community.
The bake sale idea is the best one I’ve heard in a long time…