>>13795546>NASA isn't even that bad budget wiseYes, I explicitly address that point in my post. That's why I said that defense spending and wall street bailouts constitute a much larger portion of both spending and quantitative easing than NASA.
>I usually think of budgets as value per welfareOnce again, I addressed this point in my post as well. In fact, that was literally the entire point of my post. Did you not read the whole bit about (1) spending a lot and doing a lot, vs (2) spending a lot and doing little, vs (3) spending little and doing little? I personally support option (1), but I think we can all agree that other things being equal, option (2) is the worst available.
I honestly don't know how you could infer that I am against spending and against funding NASA. I even explicitly say in the last paragraph that I am not against spending, I actually support more spending. The problem is that our spending is extremely inefficient, and most academics and professors will say the exact same thing if you ask them about grants, funding, and the corporatization of academia.
What I am against, is that most of our funding actually goes private corporations, and they charge the government way more than they need to for the services they provide, and government officials often have an incentive to oblige these companies and go along with this system because many of the companies that receive grants also donate to our politicians and spend millions of dollars a year on congressional lobbying. If we had a fully public system, or even a mostly public system, rather than a private, corporate system, costs would be much lower. This is why, if you look at the data, the US government like spends literally 2x as much per capita on healthcare than the UK, even though the UK actually has free healthcare and we don't. In fact, the US spends more PER CAPITA on healthcare than any other major country, and yet we are not able to provide free healthcare. Pic rel.
