The Attack On Government That's Blinding America To Its Real Problems | ThinkProgress

"[P]ublic data isn’t like the military or criminal justice systems, where the consequences of shutting down are obvious and immediate. When funding is scarce, the services with the least immediate, short-term benefits are likely to get the axe. So during the shutdown, critical statistics on the health of the economy and the health of the public were entirely hidden from the public eye. The consequences of this disruption were not temporary. The shutdown has garbled inflation statistics for up to seven months, messing with the government’s ability to calculate Social Security and other benefit payouts people depend on. Furloughed medical researchers lost vital data, in some cases because they had to literally kill their lab rats. And funding for academic scientific research — an indirect way the state distributes data to the public — was ruinously disrupted. “Scientific research is not like turning on and off an assembly line. Experiments are frequently long-term and complicated,” one researcher told Wired. “You’ve probably just destroyed the experiment.” And don’t forget sequestration, our current budget and the GOP’s de facto position on government spending. Sequestration cuts have forced several departments to cut reports on commodity prices and the state of the global workforce, with deeper cuts to other essential reports looming. The cuts to medical research could set scientific progress back a generation, according to a former NIH head. “The return on taxpayer investment is almost infinity,” George Washington Professor Andrew Reamer said about the economic data being damaged by sequestration. It’s an appropriate expression because we quite literally cannot anticipate the costs of lost data. The entire point of publicly funded statistical surveys and research is that they allow us to make new discoveries, which by definition we can’t predict, let alone value...."