In Case You Were Wondering Why Your Taxes are so Rediculously High

Well, it's the end of a busy time for Jane and I. We just completed our first grant proposals! Very exciting! A grant, proposal, incidentally, is when we ask the taxpayer (i.e. you) to give us hundreds of thousands of dollars (in my case more than half a million) for our research. I can't promise that it'll be worth it, but I know that we can't do our work without it - and this is how much it costs. Why? Because the companies that supply researchers know that they are the only ones to offer their kind of specialist equipment, and so they can charge pretty much whatever they want. And they do. A good example is the main piece of equipment in my laboratory, which is a mass spectrometer. The specific instrument I 'applied' for is a Micromass LCT, which is an entry level machine. In fact, it's probably the cheapest on the market. And the cost for this 3' x 3' x 3' box? $350,000 - the same as a reasonably sized house. But sometimes a scientist can cheat the system. This occurs when the instrument we need happens to be something that industry uses. Industry, you see, doesn't typically have access to government cash and the prices charged to them by suppliers reflects that. This is the situation for another instrument in my lab, called a VersaLaser, which is basically a laser printer on steroids. This baby doesn't just burn toner, it can cut into plastics, wood and etch metal and glass. The price for this cool piece of equipment? A pretty reasonable $15,000.
Jane's application process is relatively simple (well, it's alot of paperwork and, to be honest, nothing is actually simple in the funding game) - she is applying to NSERC for a 'Discovery Grant' which is to support her staffing and operations costs. Most of this will be to pay for grad student and post-doc 'trainees'. The bulk of her equipment costs will come out of her 'startup' grant which is provided to her by the university. As for me, I've got to buy lots of expensive equipment. Really big stuff you get from a 'Canadian Foundation for Innovation' (CFI) grant, which is bit of a funny thing because they only give you 40% of the money. Another 40% comes from a matching provincial grant (called the premier's research award or somesuch) and the 20% has to come from somewhere else, usually a vendor 'discount'. I say 'discount' (in quotes) because what this means is that the vendor overcharges by ~20% and then discounts it. The rest of my equipment (a lot of little stuff, <7000$) gets worked into a Discovery Grant application.
In any case, we've sent our grant applications out (through the York Office of Research, the proposals have to be read over and signed by the dean and the department head). Fingers crossed. And now you know (one of the many reasons) why your taxes are so high...