It's no secret that in a struggling or contracting economy, people want government to scale back on spending, and government responds, sometimes rightfully, with an assessment of which services and spending items are absolutely necessary and useful, and which are frivolous. In the present situation, in which government has balanced its budget irresponsibly, and racked up a not-so-healthy amount of debt in the process, calls for a no-frills assessment of spending and spending priorities are especially relevant. And on top of these circumstances, beyond the general, bipartisan understanding that the US government needs to do a better job of maintaining its finances, whether by reducing spending, closing tax loopholes and raising taxes, or some combination of the two, conservatives and Republicans have almost monolithically taken the 'tea party' position that we need to cut, cut, and cut some more. No tax increases, just cuts.
There are many, frequently discussed problems with this mentality: it's economically nonsensical, it directly contributes to job reduction, it places an unreasonable burden of 'sacrifice' on the lower and middle classes, and, given the unyielding nature of its proponents, it has put in jeopardy the full faith and credit of the US government. You might wholly disagree with PMB's assessments here, but you've certainly heard or read about these issues, and their surrounding debates.
What no one seems to be discussing, however, is a separate set of unforeseen consequences of a cut now, think later approach to spending cuts.
What PMB is talking about here, more explicitly, is crude valuation, the process by which we decide whether something is worth it or not. With a cut now, think later approach, we'll surely take a hasty, oversimplified approach to valuation. In higher education, this type of hasty approach takes the predictable turn of funding science, technology, math, and engineering programs (with each of these being construed in such blanket, general terms as to be entirely useless in the valuation process), and cutting the arts and humanities (incidentally, an unintended consequence of this policy in Britain has been an oversupply of workers in these fields, contributing to unemployment rates for many STEM-field graduates being higher than those of graduates in other fields). In fiscal policy, the equivalent of these hastily designated mainstays is perhaps defense spending, along with some science and medical institutes (the NIH, for example); but more or less everything else, for the rabid budget-cutters, is 'on the chopping block' (from large and expensive programs like social security and Medicare to tiny and inexpensive ones like NPR, the NEA, and the NEH).
The problem with making the same old assumptions about what's a staple and what isn't, or what's useful and what's not, especially when we have the economic gun pressed to our heads (or when we drum up that kind of hyperbolic reaction to our current economic difficulties), is that we can't predict what our future will hold, and what we'll need to address its challenges. We can't predict whether tearing down the National Endowment for the Humanities, perhaps the only organization with any Federal advocacy influence for nearly half of what we esteem as 'the liberal arts and sciences,' will deal a final blow to the teaching and learning of foreign languages in the US in an era of globalization. We can't predict whether de-funding NASA will deprive us of future morale-boosting (and residual-economic-benefit-producing) endeavors, like landing on the moon, or sending commercial aircraft beyond the atmosphere. These kinds of things can sound ridiculous, but, as Gregory Petsko, professor of biochemistry at Brandeis, has so convincingly argued, it also seemed ridiculous to continue funding virology programs after we figured out vaccines but before HIV came around, just at it seemed ridiculous to think that anyone would need to know anything about Arabic or cultures of the Middle East before September 11, 2001.
