General

Re: NASA: the elephant in the room of government spending

Kakugo — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 16:32:18 GMT

I agree mostly for one reason. If there have to be budget cuts, you need to start from somewhere, anywhere. Start doing away with that colossal waste that is the Space Shuttle and do not replace it with some other money pit. I could rant for hours about this was probably one of the worst machines man ever built so I'll just say one thing: USAF backed off from the program because they were scared by the costs and thought the spacecraft itself was borderline useless. Think about it.

PS: I really like you phrase "It just made us look good and fascinated people". It is often said stupid people are easily fascinated by big shiny objects...

Re: NASA: the elephant in the room of government spending

krazy kaju — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 15:31:32 GMT

NASA, in terms of the budget, is pretty big, but it's not as big and wasteful as, say, the Department of Agriculture. And even then, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs are much larger and much more wasteful.

Re: NASA: the elephant in the room of government spending

Self Refuting Idea — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 14:37:57 GMT

I think war and social security are bigger wastes of money. Let's save NASA's budget for last, agreed?

NASA: the elephant in the room of government spending

Libertyandlife — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 13:46:42 GMT

The other day I was in one of my classes, a speech class. One of the speeches was on the history of the space race and NASA. They talked about how "cool" they thought it was.The whole time I struck by the obviousness of government waste. The government spent probably trillions of dollars on the space race and space exploration. And for what purpose? It didn't really help us with anything. It just made us look good, and fascinated people. For that reason, noone in the room seemed to notice how much a waste of money it was. It was mostly just "peacefull" jingoism (except the whole it comes from your taxes part).

In addition, I present this Penn & Teller episode on NASA:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3580087289320113608#

What do you guys think, outside of war, biggest waste of taxpayers money EVER?