I think the Federal budget is indeed bloated and needs to be slashed.

[drray23]

3. That is a luddite view of the world.

No, we don't need to spend money on studying the mating habits of the Australian Aboriginal Spotted Marmet

These kind of statements are naive and typically made by right wingers or people with no idea of the overall scope. You may have made up this particular one ( I don't know) but it illustrates the point I am going to make.

Taken out of context, things like this might seem wasteful and useless. However, science encompasses a wide range of things, which turn out to be beneficial to mankind no matter how strange it seems.

For example, animals are good models for human diseases, often carry the same ones. Studying how they are affected let us predict the next pandemic.

Likewise, funding scientists to catalog the type of plants growing in some remote parts of the Amazonian forest might seem useless, however a huge amount of medicinal drugs have their origins in nature, discovered after we studied these plants.

I could go on but because as a lay person, one does not see the significance does not mean it's not.

I do agree that there are other areas where one could save money, the defense budget being an obvious one. Taking pot shots at science is where I draw the line.