What would happen if the US Government stopped funding research and special projects?

They would have to rely on donations fro the public which is not a bad thing.

A lot of things you take for granted now a days came from government funded research, like computers, the internet, satellites (GPS, communications, etc.), light weight materials like fiberglass, carbon fiber, kevlar...

If you were to cut all this spending, you would then also have to remove all restrictions the government has placed on specific types of research as well.

Even then, letting industry run wild with research isn't necessarily the best thing for the people either. Look at cell phones, for an example. Sprint...AT&T...Verizon, etc. All of these use different standards - that they each created. As a result, phones made for Sprint, won't work on AT&T and so on. This has severely hamstrung development and deployment of cellphone technology in the US as now we essentially need to redundantly deploy towers for each separate network, instead of using 1 standard, which means you only need 1 set of towers. There are vast areas in the US where there is no cellphone coverage, and the only internet connection available is via slow dial-up modems from 20 years ago. The corporations won't spend the money in these areas deploying services because it's not profitable for them. So the rich, large cities get service (well, sometimes) and the majority of folks living out of reach, are just plain out of luck.

Now imagine if this were to be the way other industries operated as well. Oh, sorry, your Garmin GPS won't work with Tom Tom's satellites - next time buy a Tom Tom!

Want another example? Look at the pharmaceutical industry. Take our drugs - it'll cure that thing we just invented! Of course then you'll have to take more drugs for the side-effects from the first drug - but hey that's how we roll! Do you seriously want every industry to become one in which they would rather let you die because you can't afford their product?

That would NOT happen. Private industry is interested in PROFITS and unless they think something might be profitable they won't bother supporting it.

I know a lot of physicists that I work with that make pretty crappy pay considering their education and they could make more in a private industry but they wouldn't be able to research the stuff they want to research. It comes down to a CEO telling a physicist what to research rather than someone that actually knows what's going on deciding.

Without federal funding for research we wouldn't have super-conductors. That research funding in the private industry would have stopped when the lower temps saw MORE resistance as it went down. They never would have found out that around 7 kelvin resistance practically disappears.

You're probably thinking "Who cares?" But something very important came from that...super conducting magnets. They are found in those fancy MRI machines. That research has saved many lives, created a lot of jobs, and added a branch to medicine.

Other countries would emerge as leaders (China!) in research, they would control the flow of information from that research too. As it is now it's pretty open here. We've already let them have manufacturing, it would be a bad idea to basically just hand scientific research over to them as well.

In addition, there's that whole thing called the internet. Private industries thought they would lose their assses on the internet, but the gov. backed it and it turns out it's an entire new industry and most people including myself can barely remember what it was like not having the internet around.

If we don't advance as a country, we'll get passed up. We'll lose even more jobs overseas.

The cost of health care would rise so the 'Non-Profit" hospitals could donate money to Research thus causing the Tax Payers to still foot the bill by paying the Hospital instead payroll with drawl either way the research will get funded by us just a different way.

So yes Private industry will fill the void by raising prices/rates and you will still have to pay for it.

Private industry already fills the void to some degree, but we also get to use that as a write-off. The problem is we don't just fund research in this country as you seem to assume. One of my company's major projects that they have been funding for about 5-6yrs is for a program in Argentina. All of our interns from this are from S. America and Mexico. We do very little funding of universities near our plants in U.S. If you don't mind other countries doing all the discoveries and making the money, I guess that's fine. Because Patents = money!

My question is why do Republicans always want to strip money from areas that might make us profitable as a society and possibly put us ahead of other countries intellectually? Why do they only want to throw money at religious and anti-abortion groups. All this does is increase the population. Increasing the population = less open jobs. Less open jobs = more strain on SSI. More strain on SSI = less money from taxes. Less money from taxes = we are more indebted to China.

Corporations don't want to spend money on R&D. It's expensive and it doesn't always pay off. People don't INVEST money unless they're pretty sure it will pay off.

For instance, all the vaccines for diseases that used to kill a lot of people were developed at public expense because no corporation could see how they could make money at it. So we all pay to develop them and then the drug corporations make huge profits selling them to us.

Microprocessors and satellite communications were developed at public expense for 'defense' purposes. As was the GPS system--in fact it was originally only going to be for use by the military.

Most countries have an 'industrial policy' where the govt. pays to develop products to keep the country competitive. The Japanese govt. paid to help develop flat screens for TVs and computers (and, it turned out, cellphones, and the instrument panes of cars and airplanes). We don't have an industrial policy, instead we have a -defense- policy, with occasional 'spin-off' benefits for consumer products.

Laissez-faire free-market capitalism has never actually been tried, because even people who like the idea know it wouldn't work.

Einstein worked on the Institute for progressed study in Princeton, which gained federal investment. The Princeton Plasma Physics Lab additionally gets investment and works on Fusion and equipped the tocomac gadget. there are various extra i'm confident yet it rather is only the 1st concern that got here to concepts. the internet your on and the gadget, we call them computers, that enable's you do it rather is yet another.

The US would definitely become a 3rd world nation. Our corporations would move abroad for the education of the workers and research being done by other nations.

China and India would continue to emerge as new science leaders

There would be a lull, as the more pure science research stops, and then commercial interests would pick up the slack.

private industry fulfilled all those roles in the 1st place.