[qqqwerty]

We are at the tail end of a 50 year bull run powered by declining interest rates. Maybe ZIRP is the new normal and private industry R&D investment stays high, but I don't think we should gamble our status as an economic, scientific, and technological powerhouse on that and gut our government financed R&D programs.

Further more, my wife works in biotech so I have seen first hand the compromises one has to make to secure private funding. They care about things like market size and revenue potential when making these investments, which means you end up with most of the money flowing towards diseases that largely affect rich people and solutions that are either expensive or recurring. And lets also not forget that almost all of these companies are working off of or spinning out from research programs that were funded by the government. I have yet to meet a single company where that wasn't the case.