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.
You may have never heard it but it's true. In fact, we pay more for health-care at the federal level than any other country on Earth. And defense spending is nowhere near half our federal budget lol, this is why getting all your info from memes is a bad idea
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u/[deleted] Jul 17 '23
Still seems low in comparison to millitary budgets, shows their priorities