If you increase the funding then the supply of scientists will simply grow until funding as again as competitive as it is today. The first order problem is that the funding ends up with mediocre scientists rather than brilliant scientists.
It’s more complex than that. For example, consider the subject’s complaint that “This old guy is out of touch” as a problem. It has been equally argued, with data, that giving established, older investigators a steady funding stream simply by weight of seniority is strangling promising early career labs.
In the US, in the biomedical sciences, it is pretty easy to be paid to get a PhD, but far more difficult to become faculty, and even more difficult get a grant as faculty. This imbalance has created the funding problem we have today.
