(03-28-2018 10:20 PM)tanqtonic Wrote:  

(03-28-2018 09:59 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(03-28-2018 09:43 PM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  Point taken about the overreach in my response. I'll quibble that inherently all of the government spending is linked back to legislation in some way or another, but you're right that I went a bit further.
My response to OO stuck more to legislation and some benefits I saw. And I have to say, even you benefited from Obamacare with regards to pre-existing conditions being covered.

Nope. Because I, like many if not most Americans, already had that covered.

Quote:That's one of those laws where you don't recognize the benefit until you need it. So you got some of the benefit to the kick to the nads. I'm not the only one in this conversation benefiting from that "welfare."
Plus, let's be honest, a lot of the programs/research the government funds with the revenue it takes in via taxes are very hard to value at the time of that revenue receipt. But the list of government funded research that affects our day-to-day lives in a net positive manner is vast.
And finally, to your comment about no specific legislation making your life tangibly better, is that because, perhaps, you're only focusing on the direct effect to your wallet because that is the easiest place for you to see a tangible effect? It's often difficult to see the benefit of say, environmental or safety regulations, because they are in place to prevent certain acts from happening, so much so that we often start taking them for granted and forgetting their benefit.

Here's the thing. Government can't create anything. All they can do is rob from Peter to pay Paul. So every government "benefit" comes with a cost. A benefit might be a net positive, taken in a vacuum, but when offset against the cost, maybe it's a net loser. Many governmental actions are.

I will somewhat disagree with you. Government funding of research *can* lead, in a long enough time frame, to substantially more benefit than what was put in. Not always.... but it can.

Proof positive: I must have destroyed (consumed) at *least* 2000 bottles of Tang (or is it 'Tanq', I forget) during my life....

Seriously, I think the basic government research into distributed networks has been about a 100,000-bagger in the long run, if not more. Those few successes tend to be BFS (really big successes). In a generalized sense research sense, the cost/benefit ratio I think would tend to be (maybe) just slightly positive.

I’d like to know what the full data set is, but:

Quote:
The value of these investments is borne out by history. According to economists Charles Jones and John Williams of Stanford University, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, the return on investment for publicly funded scientific research and development is somewhere between 30 percent and 100 percent, or more.

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/...-research/

Based on the rest of the article, my guess is that a few massive success stories create that ROI and cover up a lot of the research that is either a dud, or doesn’t have monetary value. For example, Google was created as part of a group funded by the NSF.