Where does all the "redirected" taxpayer money go?

No really, it's a serious question.

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I was watching a recommended video by Sabine Hossenfelder on Youtube, one that was published just a few days ago. If you don’t know her, Sabine Hossenfelder is a German physicist with a popular Youtube channel of over 1.6 million subscribers. In a video published just a few days ago, she bemoans that academia has become a bullshit center, one that is more interested in keeping its research grants and cushy jobs rather than actually pursue scientific truth and actually useful research.

The timing for that video is likely not random. I’ve written a few times about the DOGE program, and so has Sabine — in fact, a video published only 7 hours ago on her channel (at the time of writing) is titled “Trump and Musk take on academia”, though at this time it is only available to paid channel members — and on that note, my question also applies to Trump and Musk.

To preface: Sabine is not necessarily wrong in all that she says. Her account is not unique to academia either, and I don’t want to approach this piece as if it was.

But throughout the seven-minute video, in which she explains from her Youtube day-job that physicists especially are bullshitting the public with theories they know are bunk so they can keep getting grants, I kept asking myself: “But where would all this saved money go?”

Since Sabine’s video is her personal account of this situation, it makes sense to dwell a little bit on what other personal views she has. I was actually introduced to Sabine, who can now be considered a physics superstar considering her vast reach, from a video she published in late 2023 simply titled Capitalism is good. Let me explain.

The arguments presented in the video were surface-level high school arguments — that’s not an exaggeration, that was exactly what I was taught in high school too — to defend capitalism as being “human nature” and basically the best we’ve got out of a bad situation. She brought up a few counter-arguments to her mistaken reading of history (such as repeating the myth of the barter era) but dismissed them as “a story for another time,” refusing to engage with any criticism that would weaken her point or invalidate it entirely. If you can get through the dryness, economist Paul Cockshott has a great video taking on Sabine’s arguments for capitalism and actually going into the criticism.

The video at the time made a lot of noise, certainly compounded by the fact that a few times prior, Sabine published her thoughts (read: opinions) on gender and transgender identities, echoing dangerous rhetoric to her one million followers that follow her for physics — and she is good at physics, I’m sure.

In regards to the misunderstandings of gender she displayed, the common criticism was that she cherry-picked social research she didn’t fully understand to arrive at a certain conclusion. Much like her capitalism video, in which she dismissed all criticisms of capitalism as “a story for another time.”

From this history, we can infer two things: Sabine enjoys being controversial to an extent, and she likes capitalism.

All of that serves to say — if it needed to be said — that we do not make history as we please, as noted critic of capital Karl Marx wrote. In this case, we are the product of external conditions imposed on us. Sabine has 1.6 million subscribers, and she needs to deliver a product that will make her subscribers happy to keep watching and supporting her. Her own Patreon stats show that she makes ~9500 dollars per month from her channel (and that’s only one source), and she uploads several times a week, nowadays mainly science news. By all metrics, this is a job. And probably even a full-time one, though I also saw that she has a teaching position at a Frankfurt university.

In the video that opens this piece — about the bullshit research — she certainly presents some important questions. She asks why academia thinks taxpayers are too dumb to notice their money is being spent on frivolous research programs that promise miracles while the researches know they will never find any of that. It’s enough to make anyone’s blood boil.

But she never asks “what do we do with all this saved money?” Indeed, she seems more interested in criticizing her ex-colleagues as grifters and implores them to correct their mistaken ways — but never asks “why did academia develop this way?” And it seems very strange not to ask this question when one supports capitalism, because the two are inextricably linked.

When it comes to academia, it’s actually pretty easy to explain. And considering Sabine made a video praising and defending capitalism, she should have been able to put 2 and 2 together. In fact, this is not unique to Sabine: anyone who defends capitalism, which is the system the world lives under, should also understand how it shapes our ideas and actions. And we all understand this at least to some extent; who has never had a tyrant boss who got their job through nepotism? This situation is a symptom of an economic system that allows this to happen. It may not be unique to capitalism, but capitalism lets this situation happen and does nothing to prevent it.

Capitalism is the reason science sucks, it’s the reason your job sucks, it’s the reason everything right now sucks. Hearing that always feels jarring the first time — I remember when I started hearing critiques of capitalism — as if one is taking on a god; the god of capital, perhaps!

Considering that we live under capitalism — or at least Sabine does, being in Germany — it seems pretty blind to want to divorce one from the other, as if academia somehow exists outside of the system that funds it. It’s the same argument I see all the time for the “independent” media. The news media gets funded by the state because it’s not a very profitable business, but then still claims to be independent as if this funding wouldn’t stop the moment the newspaper starts printing things that embarrass the sponsor. And if the funding stops, the newspaper goes out of business. Therefore, it is in the paper’s interest not to publish things that could upset this balance or make it difficult in any way.

The scientific community itself came from capitalism. Science itself (the method, the truthful discoveries, etc) is not unique to capitalism. But academia as an institution came about in the 1700s or so, under nascent capitalism, and was originally started by rich nobles who suddenly had a lot of time on their hands and nothing to do with it. For a hundred years, under the impulsion of these nobles and colonizers, eugenics was an accepted field of science — we see from this that science can be ideological too, and can exist for ideological purposes. Much like capitalism, it doesn’t somehow exist outside of what we make of it, and this provides a vector of critique, because how could you criticize something you have no control over?

Science is largely funded by capitalist companies — obviously, one might say, being that we live under capitalism. They don’t want to fund higg’s bosons and theoretical particles, because you can’t sell subatomic particles to the public in a subscription package. So they fund the “sexier” research, the one that promises actionable results and a product that can be packaged and sold in the next few years. In consequence, it seems to me that the problem is not so much academia itself or the people in it, but rather the people that fund academia. In other words, if you change the conditions by which academia exists, then you will change how the people in it act, all without having to switch out the actual people in it. There is precedent for this, and so this assertion is easily provable. Eugenics was an accepted field of science, as we mentioned, and now it’s not. Scientists still exist, but don’t promote eugenics anymore — for the most part.

Sabine doesn’t directly say that academia needs to be defunded. But that is what she is driving at ultimately. And what bothers me perhaps is that she never brings that point up or ask “what will we do with all this new money once we stop funding bullshit research”. What will happen if taxpayer money stops funding bullshit grants, as she puts it, is that allocated funds will dry up and many scientists will leave academia. It will mean less money spent, which is not a bad thing necessarily, but getting the money “back” is one thing; putting it where you or I want it to go is another.

Research grants are certainly largely funded by public money because as we saw, capitalists want results now and not in 100 years. However, this long-term research also benefits capitalists as they are the ones that will ultimately use its results, but they get it funded by our money instead of theirs. It’s kinda like how we pay for college to get trained to be good workers instead of employers fronting the money to train us directly — they externalize the cost and pass it on to someone else so they can save the cost but still profit from the result.

But a lot of stuff comes out of our tax money, not just bullshit research. One of them, especially if you live in the US, is the so-called defense budget. The Department of Defense receives more than 800 billion dollars a year to spend however it wishes with no oversight. Meanwhile, taxpayer-funded research in the US amounts to a total of 200 billion dollars a year — and this isn’t just academia, but all R&D. Between the two, I’m more concerned about the bloated budget that helps kill Palestinians and other innocent people than the DUNE project.

In Germany, where Sabine lives, the federal R&D budget is a measly 10 billion euros per year, yet the military budget is 80 billion euros (with an additional 100 billion spending until 2026). This seems a bit more important to me than cutting out research Sabine disagrees with.

Personally I’m more concerned about these bloated security theater budgets than someone getting 10,000 dollars over three years to write a paper on the words online communities like to use — and yes that paper is real, I’ve read it, and it’s a real example of bullshit grants. But that money is nothing, it barely registers as a rounding error.

Assume you save maybe 50-100 billion dollars in total by making cuts, where does it go? Not even the people tasked with making these cuts want to answer that question because they know the answer will not satisfy anyone. That is because the money will go either into their pockets, or in the defense budget. It will certainly never make its way to important expenditures like education, healthcare or unemployment. And if it does make its way to these institutions, it will end up in the pockets of executives before it even helps you buy a pack of paracetamol.

Be wary of charts and statistics here, that will happily be used to show public expenditure is going up year by year, because the same question applies: where does the extra spent money go? It certainly isn’t going in my local hospital that’s had a terrible reputation for the past 20 years. It probably isn’t going into yours either.

And this is what bothers me with essentially all arguments relating to “we need to save costs”. What for? To do what with? You and I don’t decide where taxpayer money goes, capitalists do. Saving it from one area, like Musk is pretending to be doing, is only going to shift it around to another area that will be even less desirable. It’s the same reason welfare and unemployment programs have slowly been gutted since the 1970s (since neoliberalism came about in the West). We spend more money spying on people to make sure they don’t cheat the system than we do helping them. If we stopped with these anti-worker measures, we would actually save money — even when taking into account the increase in welfare or disability cases that would come about. But instead, the right-wing who pushes for these punitive measures in the first place uses the terrible results their laws get to argue for defunding welfare. They will argue “oh, people don’t ask for welfare, see, there are fewer recipients each year. So why are we spending so much on it still?” But they fail to admit that there are fewer recipients because they make it so difficult to qualify that people simply fall through the cracks and into destitution. Then budget is taken out, they pocket it, and they rinse and repeat. Eventually, 30-40 years down the line, welfare programs close down and never reopen.

In 1997, the U.S. Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, which provided financial assistance to children in low-income families, was terminated in favor of the the more restrictive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. The NHS, the darling of public healthcare in the West, is being gutted more and more every year, to the point that you can certainly have life-saving surgery (after waiting), but can’t

And the worst part is, it works. How many people are now calling for the end of public healthcare, which worked great in the 20th century, in favor of fully privatized healthcare? U.S. propaganda has made it so that people don’t want the NHS for themselves, because “the wait times are unbearable” — but this is fixable. It’s just that successive right-wing governments are doing everything in their power to destroy this service and sell it to their execs. Public hospitals, built with taxpayer money, are being sold to private conglomerates who turn them into a profit-making machine. They only take the high-paying cases, such as plastic surgery, sports medicine or radiology, and leave the difficult low-margin procedures (emergencies, oncology, etc) to public hospitals. Then, when private hospitals are profitable but public ones aren’t, this is used to justify further budget cuts in public hospitals with the goal to completely close them down the line.

RFK Jr.’s latest plan to stop SNAP recipients (food stamps, for my non-US readers) from purchasing “junk food” with this alternative currency is one such step towards eventually destroy the program altogether. This asks a lot of new questions. What is the criteria for deciding between junk food and “healthy” food? Why do people need to be told what to purchase in the first place? Do rich people not buy junk food for their kids or themselves too? In every other country in the world, welfare recipients receive money and they decide how to spend it for themselves. In fact, this system creates a black market for people to sell their SNAP — recipients trade it for a fraction of the cost with their neighbors and other people who do not qualify for SNAP. By limiting SNAP currency to only certain food items, some people will opt not to ask for SNAP because they won’t be able to spend it on anything; they won’t even be able to trade it. It seems then that the most logical conclusion would be to do it like the rest of the world does and just send people cold hard cash, but the point is not to provide financial assistance. The point is to punish the common people for daring to ask the state to do its job of protecting them, so that money can be funneled to capitalists — through both forcing you to accept the shittiest work conditions imaginable just so you don’t have to go through the limbo of welfare, and secondly making sure your welfare money ends up in the pockets of capitalists anyway. Capitalists are the ones who started capitalism and the states we live under; the system was only ever meant to work for them, not for us. Why would they want it to work for us when they’re the ones who decide where the money goes and how the system works?

And it’s not unique to the USA. It will come to Europe and other places, and has come already historically. If you’ve ever had to qualify for unemployment or disability anywhere, you know. It’s the same reason homelessness is criminalized and has hoops to jump through (e.g. finding a shelter that’s not overcrowded and will take you in so you can have an address to receive mail at, including job contracts, a SIM card, or banking details) when all studies on the matter show that simply housing people for free in actual apartments will cost less money and let them get back into the workforce faster, thus actually creating money.

The argument for proponents of this new punitive measure is always the same. “Why should my taxpayer money pay for your bad choices?” But that’s how society works. We can’t live outside of society, and society is made up of people — even neoliberal ghoul Margaret Thatcher recognized that she wasn’t acting in isolation when she said that “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families” thereby instantly disproving herself. By living in society we agree that we can’t do everything in isolation. The store shelves are stocked by someone. Our cars and buses are built by someone. I certainly didn’t build my apartment with my own two hands, sourcing all the materials myself from scratch in nature. Someone designed the building and a team of people built it so that I can now live in it. It’s the same problem I have with the saying “providing for one’s own needs”. Nobody provides for themselves by themselves, we provide for each other collectively. Even if you open a business, you need clients to purchase your service to make a living. You depend on them and they depend on you. In capitalism, production is collectivized: you have coworkers, and it’s through all of your individual efforts that a product gets shipped. As Engels wrote, in capitalism there is “organisation of production in the individual workshop, and the anarchy of production in society generally.”

Let me ask my own questions instead. Why should my tax money pay for “Israel”? Why should my tax money go to Ukraine when they’re losing their war? I wasn’t aware we could decide where tax money goes individually. I’ll make sure to mention to the tax office that I want them to give me $10,000 dollars this year since I can apparently do that.

But again, this instantly highlights a contradiction. Taking money away from “Israel” does not necessarily mean it will go into actual needed programs like education, healthcare and welfare. It will sooner go into the bloated defense budget or the pockets of execs (all that “Israel” and Ukraine money already kinda does go into the defense budget seeing this money is used to buy from private contractors). So the bigger point is that it’s not enough to defund something, we also need to do the work to make sure the money goes where it actually needs to go. And my realization is that capitalism will never let us do that because we’re not the ones that decide this. Therefore, we need a new form of government where we get to decide these things.

The term paper-pusher is not new. This problem has existed for a long time. Capitalism works on the basis of infinite growth; GDP always has to increase, even if by 1% (and that is indeed what we average nowadays in the West). Conversely, any contraction of GDP in the negatives is a crisis the moment it happens. As many have already remarked before me, “when the economy is doing well it just seems to mean a lot more money for CEOs and when the economy is doing bad I lose my job”. Thus we start creating jobs whose only purpose is to push paper from one department to the next, from one institution to the next, just so that we can pretend we produced results and made GDP go up. We make changes to things that work perfectly fine just so we can say we did something today. And, in this case, we do bullshit research because if you want to keep your budget you have to use it and you also can’t easily get more budget to do the actual expensive research.

This seems like a much bigger problem to me than specifically bullshit research in academia. It’s not just a psychological problem, i.e. becoming alienated from your work because deep down you know you’re not doing anything productive, but you still have to perform the magic tricks (pushing forms and documents from one department to the next in circles) to keep earning a living. It’s a system that builds a house of cards and will eventually crumble on itself. And we are already seeing the cracks — as China, for example, who has built their economy on actual production of goods is leaving us behind in the dust in pretty much all metrics.

I didn’t mention that Sabine’s recent video was a response to a seven-year old email (remember when I said it coincides with the budget cuts DOGE is doing?) she received after she published a paper in 2017. The email called Sabine out for threatening jobs in academia with that paper, but correctly pointed out that “this is just how the system is.” And yes, it is. But the problem is not human nature in trying to find a cushy job, i.e. doing the least and gaining the most; the problem is not allocating money to R&D — the problem is not even a moderately wealthy Youtube personality scolding her colleagues into finding another line of work.

The problem is capitalism creating a fertile environment that incentivizes all of this to happen. We create a system that incentivizes profit at all costs and then wonder why people betray each other to, well, profit at all costs.

In a way, I find the bullshit in academia (though again, it’s not just academia) to be a symptom of a decaying system. I don’t mean a decaying moral system where people try to put in the least effort while maximizing gains, but a decaying mode of production that simply can’t produce anything past a certain point; one that has made it so far that it’s essentially reached all its potential, and must thus be supplanted by another system to take this human journey further.

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