5 ms·

That's a little sensational, don't you think? Virtually every morsel of our federal budget can be put in the same terms, and many are orders of magnitude larger

• lukevdp 16y ago
  Yes, fair points and I understand it's a tiny slice of a massive pie. Maybe I respect tax dollars too much, but I did get a somewhat annoyed reaction about the way spending tax dollars was so flippantly worded in the article
  • yock 16y ago
    You're ascribing a lot of authority to an article. It really bears no indication of the deliberation, or lack thereof, on the part of those setting the budget.
• jessriedel 16y ago
  In fact, I think that every single item on the federal budget should be put in exacly these terms. Every $1000 the government spends could in principle be returned to the tax payer from whom it was taken. If you can't say "this money is better spent on this government action than, say, a steel worker with a family who has 25% of his income taken as taxes", then it shouldn't be so spent. That said, I think asteroid deflection is easily worth the money.