The real risk isn’t that taxpayers get too little from federally funded research. It’s that Washington forgets why Bayh-Dole worked in the first place — and breaks one of the most successful innovation policies America has ever enacted.
Is federally funded science really a raw deal for taxpayers? Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick seems to think so. “If we fund it and they invent a patent,” he recently said, “the United States of America taxpayer should get half the benefit.”
Lutnick is proposing a 50% excise tax on the revenue that academic institutions derive from licensing research breakthroughs to private companies. It’s a deeply misinformed idea — one that would endanger the health and prosperity of the very taxpayers he claims to defend.
Nothing contained in this blog is to be construed as necessarily reflecting the views of the Pacific Research Institute or as an attempt to thwart or aid the passage of any legislation.
Proposed Patent Tax Threatens the Research That Powers Growth
Sally C. Pipes
The real risk isn’t that taxpayers get too little from federally funded research. It’s that Washington forgets why Bayh-Dole worked in the first place — and breaks one of the most successful innovation policies America has ever enacted.
Is federally funded science really a raw deal for taxpayers? Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick seems to think so. “If we fund it and they invent a patent,” he recently said, “the United States of America taxpayer should get half the benefit.”
Lutnick is proposing a 50% excise tax on the revenue that academic institutions derive from licensing research breakthroughs to private companies. It’s a deeply misinformed idea — one that would endanger the health and prosperity of the very taxpayers he claims to defend.
If we tax something, we get less of it.
Read the op-ed in The Well News.
Nothing contained in this blog is to be construed as necessarily reflecting the views of the Pacific Research Institute or as an attempt to thwart or aid the passage of any legislation.