Industry already pays higher salaries, the purpose of funding scientific research IS in fact productization even if not immediate, and new product development can't be said to be dependent on open research if 90% of the time the claims don't replicate. If anything it's the opposite, product development would depend on not wasting all your budget on replicating false claims.
> Funding scientific research is among the highest leverage things the US government can do.
A deeply subjective claim asserted as obvious fact. It can just as easily be argued that governments could spend nothing on scientific research and progress would occur at the same rate or even faster.
As for the mRNA vaccines, just be aware that this is a bad example to use for the wonders of government science. Lots of people who carefully checked the data and studies at the time realized the mRNA vaccines didn't work and public health agencies were lying about their effectiveness, as they lied about so many other things. Later on many other people realized this too, usually after taking several boosters and still getting infected repeatedly.
There are better and less controversial examples to cite if you want examples of government funded science with high impact (e.g. AlexNet), but it's not enough to point to a handful of examples. You have to show that they'd have never happened otherwise, which is impossible to show as usually it's clear that they would.
> Funding scientific research is among the highest leverage things the US government can do.
A deeply subjective claim asserted as obvious fact. It can just as easily be argued that governments could spend nothing on scientific research and progress would occur at the same rate or even faster.
As for the mRNA vaccines, just be aware that this is a bad example to use for the wonders of government science. Lots of people who carefully checked the data and studies at the time realized the mRNA vaccines didn't work and public health agencies were lying about their effectiveness, as they lied about so many other things. Later on many other people realized this too, usually after taking several boosters and still getting infected repeatedly.
There are better and less controversial examples to cite if you want examples of government funded science with high impact (e.g. AlexNet), but it's not enough to point to a handful of examples. You have to show that they'd have never happened otherwise, which is impossible to show as usually it's clear that they would.