John Stossel:

Even Republicans are unhappy. Big spending “conservative” congressman Hal Rogers calls President Donald Trump’s proposed budget cuts “draconian, careless and counterproductive.”

But Trump’s cuts are good! Why do politicians always assume that government spending helps people? It always has unintended consequences.

Foreign aid is attached to idealistic notions like ending global poverty and making friends abroad. Politicians also thought that by rewarding countries that behave well, America could steer the whole world toward responsible practices like holding elections and allowing companies (especially U.S. companies) to operate without interference. The young nation of Israel could be propped up with money for its military defense and infrastructure projects.

But today, the U.S. sends money to friends and foes alike, and it’s hard to know what those countries do with it. Israel gets billions of dollars—but we give even more money to Israel’s enemies.

Money we give to impoverished nations seldom reaches the poor people we want to help. The funds routinely go to the kleptocrat governments that made those countries such horrible places to live in the first place. Our gifts prop up authoritarians, making it easier for them to avoid free market reforms.

We’re just as dumb about spending at home.

The Department of Education doesn’t teach any kids. It imposes standards on local schools that make it harder for them to experiment. It hires bureaucrats who do endless studies—instead of letting competition show us what teaching methods get the best results.

The Department of Education also promotes government-subsidized student loans that trick students into thinking that no matter which school they pick, no matter their major, they will graduate with useful, marketable skills. Many go deeply into debt just when they should be getting a start in life.

The Department of Agriculture tips American elections. Presidential candidates promise farm subsidies to try to win the early Iowa primary. Politicians say the subsidies will rescue struggling small farms, but they rarely do. Most of the money goes to big, well-connected agribusiness. They shouldn’t get subsidies any more than other businesses should.

The so-called “war on poverty” has now cost almost $22 trillion, about three times what we’ve spent on all America’s wars. Yet poverty endures, even as markets and technology should have eliminated most of it.

Before the war on poverty began, Americans were steadily lifting themselves out of poverty. The well-intended handouts increased dependence and stopped that natural progress. They perpetuated poverty.

Obviously, some federal programs do help people. When you spend trillions of dollars, some of it will be put to good use.

But that doesn’t mean the Economic Development Administration, “Essential” Air Service, Community Services block grants or even Meals on Wheels deserve a penny more of your taxes.

“There is no magic money tree in Washington,” the Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards reminds us. At DownsizingGovernment.org, he lists many more programs that ought to be cut. Even when programs do good things, he says correctly, “It is more efficient for the states to fund their own activities—school and antipoverty programs—because doing so eliminates the expensive federal middleman.”

Having our money back means being able to pay for things we choose as individuals—including helping out the poor more effectively than the government. …

Trump and Paul Ryan do deserve credit for demanding that spending increases be offset with cuts elsewhere. But it’s a tragedy that they didn’t use this moment to try to cut more, and to cut the biggest unsustainable spending: Medicare and Social Security. Not addressing those entitlements today will mean more suffering for the poor and the elderly in the future.

Do the humane thing. Keep hacking away at that budget.

Eric Boehm:

Scientists and fans of science are getting all worked up over a proposed 20 percent cut to the budget of the National Institutes of Health. If they’re looking for someone to blame for those cuts, they can start by blaming the National Institutes of Health.

Seriously. From funding experiments that gave cocaine to quails and rats, to studying the sex habits of hamsters and goldfish, there are few parts of the federal government that have made a better case for budget cut than the NIH.

Adrienne LaFrance has a piece at The Atlantic that takes the hysteria over President Donald Trump’s first budget proposal to new heights. The budget, which includes a cut of $6 billion to the NIH, has scientists bracing for “a lost generation in American science,” according to LaFrance, who says scientists told her that the “consequences of such a dramatic reduction in public spending on science and medicine would be deadly.”

One of those scientists, Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, tells LaFrance that the proposed cuts “would bring American biomedical science to a halt and forever shut out a generation of young scientists.”

Please.

Behind all the hysterics is one simple fact. Even if Trump’s budget cuts are enacted, as proposed, by Congress (which they won’t be), the NIH would be funded at the same level as it was in 2003. That’s less than 15 years ago. It’s hardly a return to the Dark Ages—heck, that’s hardly a return to the pre-iPhone ages—or to the era when smallpox and polio were running rampant. If the generation of young scientists that went to school in the 1990s and early 2000s managed to survive and get funding for research without the NIH at its current levels, then surely the next generation will.

Before going any further, though, an important note on Trump’s budget. It’s terrible. His proposed cuts are not a serious effort at reducing the size of the federal government, but rather a way to pay for a mostly useless wall on the border with Mexico and to feed the Pentagon more money ($52 billion more, to be exact), so the military can flush it down the toilet of endless wars, overpriced weapons systems, and who-knows-what-else because not even government auditors can figure out how the Department of Defense manages to waste so much taxpayer money.

The terrible spending decisions in Trump’s budget, though, do not make his proposed cuts any less legitimate, and few government agencies have made a better, stronger case for having their own budgets reduced.

More than 80 percent of the NIH’s annual budget is used to fund research grants, mostly for universities and post-grad students. While there is plenty of good research funded by the NIH, there’s also no shortage of examples that make you wonder if they’re secretly conducting a study on how many ridiculous, wasteful studies they can fund before Congress or the president cuts their budget.

Perhaps the most infamous example of pure WTF research funded by the NIH is the $175,000 grant given to the University of Kentucky to study how cocaine affects the sex drives of Japanese quail.

“It’s hard to think of a more wasteful use of American taxpayers’ money than to give cocaine to quail and studying their sexual habits,” deadpanned then-Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) in highlighting the study in his 2011 report on wasteful government spending.

There are plenty of other head-scratching examples, like the $509,000 grant used to study how meth-heads responded to text messages using “gay lingo.” The NIH spent more than $2.8 million over four years funding a study to determine why “nearly three-quarters of adult lesbians overweight or obese,” and why gay men generally are not. More than $600,000 from the NIH helped finance a study on the sex habits of hamsters, and another $3.6 million from the NIH allowed researchers at Bowdoin College to ponder “what makes goldfish feel sexy?”

My personal favorite is the 2012 NIH-funded study that determined rats on cocaine prefer listening to jazz music instead of classical. Specifically, they like listening to Miles Davis’ classic album “Four” more than Beethoven’s “Fur Elise.” Don’t worry, the researchers did the same experiment with rats high on methamphetamine, too, and found that they also enjoy Miles Davis. Cool.

Not to be outdone, researchers at the University of Illinois used a $242,600 NIH grant to get honeybees high on cocaine, ultimately discovering that the intoxicated bees are “about twice as likely to dance” and moved 25 percent faster than sober bees.

Other NIH studies simply prove what everyone already knows, like when a $548,000 grant helped demonstrate that adults over age 30 who frequently binge-drink tend to be less mature than their peers. Or when the NIH spent $666,000 on a study that found watching re-runs of old television shows make people happy, because it gives them an “energizing chance to reconnect with pseudo-friends.”

Even when they try to clean up their act, the NIH ends up raising questions about how it’s spending taxpayer money. After a government audit found that the NIH had blown $823,000 on a Las Vegas conference (enough to fund five more studies about the drug habits of Japanese quail, can you believe?) in 2010, the agency created new levels of bureaucratic oversight to make sure that didn’t happen again. The problem: Bloomberg reported in 2015 that the additional oversight costs as much as $14.6 million annually, roughly equal to how much the agency spends each year researching Hodgkin’s disease.

The hilarious examples of waste at the NIH are just a drop in the bucket of the federal deficit, of course, but it certainly seems like the agency could do a little trimming without losing any critical medical research.

Even without budget cuts, that research is increasingly being driven by the private sector anyway.

In her piece at The Atlantic, LaFrance points out that the federal government funded 60 percent of research and development in the United States in 1965. By 2006, however, more than 65 percent of R&D funding was coming from private sources, she notes.

This, we’re meant to believe, is a bad thing. A sign that government—that all of us—is not doing its part to finance the scientific discoveries that make the modern world such a wonderful place to live. For shame.

Get rid of the percentages, though, and a different picture emerges. Funding for the NIH has increased by about 3.5 times between 1970 and 2015 (not quite enough to keep pace with inflation, but pretty close). Most of that increase has been in the past two decades. In just five years, from 2000 through 2004, the NIH’s budget grew by a whopping 58 percent, and there was another huge boost in NIH funding during the Obama administration’s stimulus program (lots of shovel-ready jobs in labs, one assumes).

There hasn’t been a reduction in public funding for research and development, but government funding now makes up a smaller portion of the overall pie because privately funded research has grown so quickly that it’s overtaken government as the main patron of science. That’s not a bad thing! Sure, privately funded research is subject to approval from corporate overlords at times—in her piece, LaFrance quotes an associate professor of psychiatry at Yale who proclaims that only “sexy, hot” science will get private funding, instead of the tedious research that leads to most important breakthroughs—but if that means fewer studies on why rats like Miles Davis, I think we’ll survive.

Similarly, I think we’ll be okay if a smaller budget for the NIH means the agency has to prioritize important things like research into deadly diseases ahead of questionably useful studies on the drug habits of Japanese birds, the importance of old television shows, and the sex habits of small mammals.

Investors Business Daily:

Let’s start with a basic fact. Contrary to news reports last week, President Trump is not eliminating funding for Meals on Wheels. He’s not even cutting it.

How do we know this? Meals on Wheels says so. A statement issued by Meals on Wheels America on Thursday notes that 35% of the revenues at the 5,000 or so local Meals on Wheels programs come via the Older Americans Act Nutrition Program.

Trump’s budget outline says nothing about this program whatsoever.

What Trump’s budget does propose is cutting is the corruption-prone Community Development Block Grant program, run out of Housing and Urban Development. Some state and local governments use some of that grant money, at their own discretion, to “augment funding for Meals on Wheels,” according to the statement.

Nevertheless, when the New York Times reported on Trump’s budget last Wednesday, they dispensed with such details, and simply said that CDBG “funds popular programs like Meals on Wheels, housing assistance and other community assistance efforts.”

This misleading shorthand quickly turned into “Trump wants to kill Meals on Wheels.”

Time magazine, for example, blared that Trump’s budget “would kill a program that feeds 2.4 million senior citizens.” The Hill said it “eliminates funds for Meals on Wheels.” A local Dallas station reported that the program would lose “all of its federal funding.” Others claimed — falsely — that Trump’s budget director said Meals on Wheels wasn’t worth funding because it didn’t get results.

The New York Times itself fanned the flames of its own misleading coverage with follow-up stories about how “GOP, Dem Lawmakers Decry Trump’s Cuts To Meals On Wheels” and how the program “gets results.”

When the actual facts started to emerge over the weekend, the fake story had already taken hold in the popular press and on social media.

So what’s really going on?

As Meals on Wheels America explained, some Community Development Block Grant money does end up going to some of the local Meals on Wheels programs.

But it’s a tiny amount. HUD’s own website shows that just 1% of CDBG grant money goes to the broad category of “senior services.” And 0.17% goes to “food banks.”

We looked at several local Meals on Wheels programs and found that block grant money was often a pittance, and as often as not the programs got no CDBG money.

Last year, for example, the Meals on Wheels program in Rockland County, N.Y., received a total of $25,000 from CDBG — less than 1% of its budget.

Kennewick, Wash., directed $18,500 in grant money to Senior Life Resources’ Meals on Wheels program in 2015, a year in which the charity got $13.3 million in total government grants.

Fairfield, Calif., gave its local Meals on Wheels $10,539 of CDBG money in 2015, after giving it $0 for the previous four years.

Meals on Wheels of Trenton, N.J., asked for $50,000 in community grant money last year, and got nothing. It received no grant money the year before, either.

All of this information was easily available to anyone reporting on this story, or anyone commenting on it, which would have prevented the false claims about the Meals on Wheels program from spreading in the first place. But why bother reporting facts when you can make up a story that will drive Trump’s approval ratings even lower?

Then for dessert, Ben Shapiro:

Last week, we heard wailing and gnashing of teeth on the left thanks to President Trump’s proposed budget slashing funding for the Community Development Block Grant, which costs taxpayers $3 billion per year. That’s because some of the money from the CDBG goes to Meals on Wheels – although the vast majority of the Meals on Wheels budget comes from elsewhere.

The left reacted to the news by calling Americans stingy and nasty. If the government wouldn’t cover the cost for Meals on Wheels, the theory went, then Meals on Wheels would die a horrible death, along with the 2.4 million seniors to which it provided necessary nutrition.

Except that’s not what happened.

According to CNN:

Meals on Wheels received 50 times the typical amount of daily donations on Thursday after the White House proposed cuts to some of the program’s sources of funding, a spokesperson for the group said. Volunteer sign-ups also jumped, increasing by 500%, according to Jenny Bertolette, a spokeswoman for Meals on Wheels America.

Naturally, that hasn’t stopped the folks at Meals on Wheels from calling for more federal funding. They say that volunteers should call up the government and decry the budget cuts. But Americans are more than willing to fill the gap, if government is left out of it.

And this is the major disconnect between right and left: the left believes that every act of kindness is a collective action problem, that vicious individualists will refuse to help their fellow man. The right believes that every government intrusion lessens the freedom for individual agency, including charity. Charitable action and statistics prove that the right is correct on this score: when people assume the government will do something, they stop giving. When they know somebody is in trouble, they’re moved to action.

CNN treats this story as a sort of exercise in shaming the Trump administration. In truth, it should shame the left to recognize that the same Americans they slander as too cold-hearted to help others are more than willing to step up when moral duty calls.