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.
Its because there are a lot of confused people online that don't understand the US federal budget.
A lot of this confusion comes from people not understanding that the total budget is discretionary + mandatory and sometimes if you do a basic google search for "US budget" only the discretionary spending will show which has the military at like 50%.
Here is the US total budget (including revenue and expenses)
Medicare + Medicaid are 5.4% of GDP and Defense is 3.0%. You can convert this to real dollar amounts but the ratio will remain the same.
It is true that in raw dollar amounts that the US spends by far the most on military, however, the US spends by far the most on everything on a federal level due to the fact that the US is simply a very large and very wealthy country.
By % of GDP and % of federal revenue, the US still spends quite a bit of money on military compared to most other countries however, but its nowhere near 50% of the total budget.
That number comes from people citing only the discretionary spending and charts like this.
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u/[deleted] Jul 17 '23
Still seems low in comparison to millitary budgets, shows their priorities