Staff Scientists don't help with teaching, essentially by definition, unless we dilute teaching to the very broad level of "helping students with things". They are certainly helpful for research, and in my experience only somewhat useful for writing proposals - certainly not to the point that they'd be self-funding (rare is the staff scientist who is good at writing proposals, wants to, yet does not want to be a PI).

None of that gets to the actual point of my comment, which is that it's all well and good to say people should do science for science's sake, but in the meantime, rent is due.