It's an intellectually dishonest and particularly annoying (yet extremely common) way to argue.
My mistake, it's an actual cut rather than merely a proposal.
> This is the logical fallacy of the "excluded middle".
- come again? The negation of a proposition is not its opposite (for most possible understandings of what an opposite is).
The fallacy of the excluded middle is considering only a small subset of possibilities. It applies here, not with what was explicitly stated, but an underlying assumed view. It is assumed that arguing against spending current amount X of money on science, means arguing for not spending any at all. Obviously that would be bad, because we wouldn't have the current benefits. In fact, we can also spend somewhere in between 0 and X (e.g. X/2) or even more than X. We'll get some non-zero amount of benefits for these, and it's not as clear that it's worse off, unlike spending nothing.
When the vast majority of the people who promote science are just as intellectually dishonest as any other variety of religious fundamentalists, I think it rightfully raises a lot of questions about the true value of the endeavor.
It argues against a proposed marginal cut in spending on science. In order to portray this as a bad idea, he then argues that in total, spending on science is a good thing.
Similarly, I oppose 10% cuts in military spending because if the military were cut 100% 50 years ago, I'd probably have suffered under communism.
This is the logical fallacy of the "excluded middle".