Quote:
Originally Posted by hometeam
This amazes me sometimes. Did you look at the defense budget? How many multi-million dollar bombs do we need? Not nearly as many as we buy, and the defense budget is a contract sweepstakes for a handful of rich investors at the expense of the american public. We cant take care of hungry or sick people, but we can line the pockets of defense contractors with tax money, and then call for budget cuts to the greatest science organization ever known. phewwwwwwwww
I mean.. you do realize NASA does more than just send robots to mars right?
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I don't know what your "argument" has to do with anything I said. If anything, you just supported what I was saying. The amount we spend on defense (and hey, lets include debt servicing while we are at it) really distorts "percentage" comparisons when we are talking about funding programs like NASA.
You have to look at return on investment--and that changes over time; during the 60s you had an incredible return on investment with the money spent on NASA even though in today's dollars valuation we actually spent a lot more money on the program. There were a lot of new discoveries and branches of sciences that spun off of the NASA program. Today, however, we have gone beyond a point of diminishing returns. The majority of money that currently goes into NASA would be better spent funding other science programs, as I mentioned, such as the National Science Foundation and National Institute for Health.
I'm all for slicing the defense budget; cut it in half. The cost of maintaining our military is strangling us. We didn't win the Cold War on the battlefield; we won it because we bankrupted the Soviets. Cutting the defense budget in half would eliminate a lot of deficit spending, that money could go towards paying down the servicing of our debt. We could then plow that money back into education, infrastructure and social programs (whose costs should start declining again in about 2035 when the boomers start dieing off). In the meantime, 2/3rds of the current NASA budget would go towards branches of science that have a higher RoI and as deficit spending decreases and is eliminated, the
percentage of the budget spent on scientific research increases dramatically.
Just because
you perceive that a particular program is a relatively small percentage of a budget doesn't mean it is a small program. 0.6% of the water in a bathtub is a completely different scale than 0.6% of the water in the Pacific ocean.