Speaking at the National Academy of Sciences this morning,
President Obama
declared, "I am here today to set this goal: we will devote
more than 3 percent of our GDP to research and development."
The AP reports:
He set forth a wish list for the future including "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.
Like most of Obama's domestic proposals, the underlying idea is
that private enterprise isn't allocating resources efficiently
enough, and that a more active role for the federal government is
required to make sure that society's wealth is channeled toward
worthy goals. Sure, the way Obama presents it, who could be
against all of these wonderful scientific breakthroughs? The
problem is that this idea of setting a target for how much our
nation will allocate toward a sector of the economy and
goals for what that money will yield was a basic tenet of all of
the failed centrally planned economies of the 20th Century.
It's also worth putting Obama's numbers in context. In 2007, the
most recent year for which I was able to find data, Plunkett
Research
pegged R&D spending in the U.S. at $360 billion, which
was more than any other nation in the world. As a percentage of
GDP, the U.S. was at 2.6 percent, second in the world only to
Japan. Obama suggested increasing this number to more than 3
percent. So let's just say we make it 3.1 percent. Given the most
recent GDP was
$14.2 trillion, we're looking at a gap of about $70 billion a
year that Obama evidently wants government to make up for.
Of course, Obama has a familiar retort:
"At such a difficult moment, there are those who say we cannot
afford to invest in science. That support for research is
somehow a luxury at a moment defined by necessities. I
fundamentally disagree," Obama said.
"Science is more essential for our prosperity, our security,
our health, our environment, and our quality of life than it
has ever been," he said.
And so Obama leads us further down his primrose
path.
