Our Tax Dollars at Work
- PDF / 68,895 Bytes
- 1 Pages / 612 x 792 pts (letter) Page_size
- 110 Downloads / 210 Views
Letter from the President
Our Tax Dollars at Work April, in the Northern Hemisphere, means spring! Spring weather, spring flowers, spring holidays, and, jarring as it is against this enlivening background, the income tax filing deadline in the United States and many other countries. Since we all pay taxes, and we all have an interest in the success of the materials enterprise, it behooves us to understand the connection between the two, and how the Materials Research Society is increasingly involved in efforts to encourage the government to direct resources and attention toward materials-oriented research that benefits society as a whole. Most obviously, many of us perform research financed wholly or in part with government funds. The largest granting agencies and national laboratories are run with money appropriated from tax receipts. In addition, there are governmentsponsored programs available to support “high-risk” projects within private companies, such as the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology Advanced Technology Program in the United States. Less prominent are research incentives based on the opportunity for businesses to decrease their tax payments in return for investing in research. For example, the United Kingdom offers a generous tax credit for research by smalland medium-sized companies. The U.S. government and those of many states include tax deductions for engaging in technological development that has some degree of uncertainty, and of anticipated economic development, associated with it. One difficulty with the federal research tax credit is that it rewards large increments in research investment, but not continuing research investment, even when such sustained programs are at high levels, as is the case with large, R&Dcentric companies. The fact that the tax credit provisions are not permanent also works against participation by major companies. Yet another drawback is that
MRS BULLETIN/APRIL 2004
“Since we all pay taxes, and we all have an interest in the success of the materials enterprise, it behooves us to understand the connection between the two.”
much collaborative industrial research involving universities is excluded. New approaches are needed not only to advocate directly for the expansion of these tax incentives, but to point out how much economic growth is traceable to the research done by institutions of all types and sizes. The purchases made and salaries paid in the course of doing the research itself represent significant economic activity, and the students thereby trained are the source of future innovation and entrepreneurship. MRS is already involved in congressional activities aimed at support for the large funding agencies, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the Department of Defense (DoD). These efforts range from one-on-one meetings with congressional staff to participation in large, multisociety
organizations like the
Data Loading...
