Astronomy: not American enough for John McCain?

So apparently John McCain doesn’t see my profession as a worthwhile occupation for good wholesome Americans. In one of his rabid rants about spending he views as wasteful came the following tweet:

#2. $2 million “for the promotion of astronomy” in Hawaii - because nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy
1:56 PM Feb 27th from web

Now, I don’t know anything about that particular appropriation, but if it’s anything like most astronomy grants it is probably money that would indeed mostly be spent employing people. Certainly the ~$300k grant that I submitted to the NSF last November to study exploding stars is exactly the kind of thing that he seems to be raving about in his top-10 lists on twitter. This sounds like a lot, but mostly it goes to pay for salary, etc, for graduate students. True a great big chunk gets siphoned off by the university, but even that pretty much ends up paying for salaries somewhere.

The implication here seems to be that investing in Astronomy isn’t investing in people. Apparently employing astronomers isn’t employing people. Granted, not many people make a living in astronomy, but I fail to see why it should be discounted as a profession. It certainly pays my bills and has for some dozen years or so. Indeed, many of the things he complains about sound like legitimate proposals for basic research, most of which will ultimately pay for salaries because that’s usually the cost of doing science. Even expensive equipment purchases ultimately boil down to paying someone down the line for their time. Either McCain doesn’t understand this, or he discounts this because research is the activity of “The Elite”. It takes training and education to be a researcher, and so perhaps this isn’t the work of “real Americans”? Are we seeing the classic Republican ploy of conflating elite (i.e. educated) with elitist (the belief that I’m better than all of you).

In either case, to borrow a phrase from a certain 31st century average American: John McCain can bite my shiny metal ass.