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My takeaway is that people don't have a very good sense of scale on government spending. Manhattan project: 30 billion (2012 dollars) Apollo program: 83 billi
by dTal 8y ago
My takeaway is that people don't have a very good sense of scale on government spending.
Manhattan project: 30 billion (2012 dollars)
Apollo program: 83 billion (2005 dollars)
Shuttle program: 196 billion (2011 dollars)
2008 bailouts: 700 billion (2008 dollars)
Iraq war: over 1 trillion dollars
That's right, both the Iraq war and the 2008 bailouts each dwarf the entire space program. Yet which thing attracts more hand wringing about costs? Which things require years of tiresome political wrangling, and which happened at the snap of a finger?
- latchkey 8y agoYearly US defense budget is increasing to 750 billion (2018 dollars). https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/09/politics/trump-mattis-defense-spending/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/09/politics/trump-mattis-def...
- dTal 8y agoAnother good one: total money spent by the US on fusion research, ever: 37.6 billion (2005 dollars). It really puts into perspective how many things commonly held to be incredibly difficult, or expensive, are in fact simply not a priority. Almost any pie-in-the-sky technological project or public works project you can think of utterly pales next to the money that is casually spent on dubious causes like propping up broken financial systems and destabilizing foreign countries. Maybe we should stop using "Manhattan Project" or "moonshot" to refer to huge, ambitious practically unfundable government works, when they're so cheap in the scheme of things. Maybe we should speak of "bailouts" instead.
- mac01021 8y agoAnecdotally, I hear a lot more complaints about the bailouts and the war than I do about anything related to NASA.