Both knew of friends whose prior admissions for graduate work that have been cancelled as government funds have been cut off. This included one going for her PhD at U. of Penn. The younger, and her boyfriend - also a pre-med now graduating - had any remaining funding for their research projects cut off. Both dealt with research on cancers. The concern about their future admissions to medical school is current and very real.

We finally had to agree as a table to change the topic, or we would otherwise lost any joy in Easter.

What a lovely family to have!

Perhaps another tack that could be taken in such a discussion would be to consider just how crazy it is for the US Government to be continuing spending "as usual" now that we have a debt of $34 Trillion and an annual deficit of $2 Trillion and now that our "credit card payments" (spending on servicing the existing debt) exceed our spending on our own (and more than 1/2 the world's) defense budget.

You all sound like people who would recoil instinctively from a relative who was digging this same kind of hole for herself by living off her credit cards. You would possibly even, like me, not even be able to guess what happens when you keep driving that bus at 75 mph towards the cliff.

A fun question to ask: just what spending cuts would you recommend to such a relative that would seem like crazy counterproductive spending cuts if the relatives had, say for example's sake, no credit card debt?

And from there, a comparison of how being disinvited to a graduate program because of a loss of reserarch funding would compare to the kinds of things we might imagine happen if we continued driving the bus towards the cliff for another 6 months, another year, whatever.

Of course all this would make a lot more sense if the money saved by such capricious spending cuts were being systematically applied towards the deficit. But considering that NONE OF US THAT KNOW MATH can imagine a way to eliminate a $2 Trillion dollar deficit that doesn't involve a trillion or two of spending cuts combined with a trillion or two of increased taxes, one can consider the current environment as perhaps a dry run for what we're all going to hope gets done some time soon, just as Covid was a dry run for a real pandemic.

Happy Easter!

R: