You sound like a troll, but I will respond anyhow, because there are people who actually think what you say.
I DO IT WITH MY MONEY. I don't live in the US. You can read that in the GP. I don't care that the US falls behind. Living under the US rule, or under the Chinese rule, or the Russian rule makes little difference to Latin America.
About academics, if the US doesn't fund them, someone else will. I was just pointing out the consequences.
Where I live, there is little investment in R&D, it's slowly increasing due to our economy growing steadily for the past 10 years.
The global crisis is good for us in that our exports are more expensive, and we can start industrializing our country. I hope we start investing more in R&D, and I would happily pay a lot more taxes for that. This is already a great country to live in, I would love for it to become more industrialized so it's a great place to work also.