One of John McCain's talking points on his campaign speech is calling out a three million dollar study of grizzy bear DNA as an example of outrageous “pork”.
Never mind that John McCain has exaggerated the cost of the project. Or the hypocrisy that Palin asked for even more money to study seal DNA in Alaska. Or the fact that we waste far more money than that in Iraq every single day.
I'm writing this diary to point out all the good things that a $3,000,000 study brings us. While it’s easy to scoff at the topic as sounding silly, I think people should realize that spending money on projects like this is a very good thing.
So where does the budget for a $3 Million research grant go?
Universities take a portion of these grant monies for overhead expenses. And not a small amount either -- 25% or more of the total grant is a typical cut for a university administration. So a large piece of that “pork” goes to keeping your local State U running.
Many professors also get their entire salaries paid out of the grants they are awarded. The tuition fees that students pay for the classes they take does NOT go to paying the people who teach those classes. So a significant slice of that federal “pork” helps pay for you or your kids to take college classes at that same State U.
Similarly, graduate students have their tuitions and stipends paid by research grants like this. Without these “pork” grants we wouldn’t have nearly as many people in this country with graduate degrees, making our workforce less competitive. The graduate students also TA classes for undergraduates. So that “pork” is paying for the training and education of graduate and undergraduate students at several levels.
And of course, these grants fund actual research supplies and equipment, much of which gets spent with American companies. Going to sequence some grizzly bear DNA? Then you’ll need primers from Integrated DNA Technologies of Coralville, IA, PCR kits from Invitrogen of Carlsbad, CA, and a sequencing machine from Applied Biosystems of Foster City, CA. So a large slice of that “pork” gets turned directly into the bottom lines of numerous American companies.
And on top of all this there’s the network effects. Universities spend their overhead to pay support staff, who spend the money on rent and groceries in their communities. Professors and their graduate students make discoveries that can potentially turn into valuable products for companies. Companies hire college graduates to develop and manufacture the research products they sell. Undergraduate students help keep the nations breweries in business. And taxes are collected from all of the above to support the services provided by states and cities nationwide.
Oh yeah... we also get to learn something about grizzly bears, which will help us keep a threatened species from going extinct.
So when John McCain says he’s not going to fund studies like this, you should keep in mind that he's really talking about slashing our funding of higher education, killing our support of our technology industries, and hurting communities nationwide.