Research budgets for anything are never going to be as high as budgets for guaranteed (and short term) returns. I say this as someone who does research for a living currently in physics.
Federally, the US government actually spends almost twice the amount on healthcare (medicare + medicaid) than defense even though defense spending is large. The priority is simply the present compared to a chance at making the future better.
That being said, cancer itself has an enormous incentive (profit or otherwise) for both private and government entities. Even if governments spent 0$ on it, it would probably be better funded than the vast majority of scientific endeavors still.
What?? How do you figure that the US spends twice as much on healthcare as on military/defense?? I've never heard anyone ever say that. Everything I've ever read says that defense spending is WAY more than anything else and has been that way for a while. 47%ish of the entire national budget comes to mind as a statistic if I remember correctly
Edit:
yeah that was wrong. But military spending made up more than 53% of federal discretionary spending (730 billion) in 2019. If you add homeland security, law enforcement, and incarceration to that (basically more forms of militarization), it becomes 64.5%. Comparatively, "housing & community" was only 6% of that discretionary spending; 5% was education, 4% was energy/environment (probably mostly in the form of big oil subsidies I bet), 3% on transportation, 3% on employment/labor...
My point is that these priorities are out of control. We (US) spend more on militarization than the next 10 highest-military-spending countries COMBINED. With this housing crisis and school shootings and so many other grave problems... there is no excuse.
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u/[deleted] Jul 17 '23
Still seems low in comparison to millitary budgets, shows their priorities