There’s so much things to divert budget from to fuel energy research. Completely unrealistic, but think luxury cars, football player’s salaries, just to name a few.
High paid professional athletes in the US today have the income of billionaires.
Professional athletes earn around $200 billion in league salary each decade (it excludes endorsements, which tilts the point that much further if included). It's far more than all S&P 500 CEOs combined. Just the three major sports leagues in the US are at around $14 billion per year in salary. That excludes coaches, which now have very high salaries as well. Stripping it down further, all NBA players combined (a mere ~450 players or so) earn more in salary every year than all the S&P 500 CEOs combined.
As of 2019 there were 122 players in Major League Baseball earning $10 million per year or more. The top 30 NBA players earn a combined $1 billion every year.
Pretty funny, the notion that ~$80+ billion in income taxes every ten years, is supposedly a nothingburger. It's a lot of tax revenue, even if it pales next to US Military spending.
