Petra, I was joking about the headache...no headache. The deficit, on the other hand, I was not joking about...A proposal that I was co-PI on would have been funded if the science budget had not been cut...to study faults that affect southern California. So, the question becomes..what does science do for Joe taxpayer...if you cut back on studying the earth, does it really matter? Or, to be more specific to what I do, does it matter if we know the geometry of faults, and what the slip is on them? Does it matter if we study past climates? It's a little hard for me to answer these question when weighed against poverty, security, people who don't feel that they should pay more than the minimum in taxes...etc etc. I can make a case that it really does matter to study past climates..because it is going to tell us something about how climates change when you load the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses...(etc..)
Chris