Comments on: NASA’s cost versus the bailout

By: Lee

Lee — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 16:37:10 +0000

I couldn’t agree more: “our grandest triumphs, in dollars, only cost us a fraction of our mistakes.” On the mistake side of the equation, I’m also sure that the hidden opportunity costs of some government ventures are even more staggering than the 2008 Bailout and Large Government Project plots shown by Voltage. Thanks for the NASA perspective, too!

By: Steve A

Steve A — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 16:24:42 +0000

@Miko
My argument was not that NASA’s worth was only because of jobs. Reread the first part of my post. My argument was to argue the claim that NASA doesn’t give back anything to the government. I think NASA is worth it just for what it does.

You seem to have a skewed vision of what is preventing companies from expanding as well. It’s not taxes. It’s the salaries of those at the top of the company. Any job cuts you see are often used to keep corporate salaries and bonuses as high as they were.

By: Pisces

Pisces — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 05:11:16 +0000

Here’s a question we should all be asking: Where is 4 trillion dollars gonna come from?

By: Jason

Jason — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 22:43:50 +0000

I hate to paint a dark picture, because I love NASA and all its accomplishments as much as the next person, but America is insolvent, on the verge of bankruptcy, and China is now refusing to continue financing the debt. America is broke, and cant spend any more money, on anything, for a long long time. It’s that bad.

By: Miko

Miko — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 19:45:56 +0000

Steve A: You’re ignoring Bastiat’s hidden costs. To create those 100 jobs, NASA needed money from taxes. Paying those taxes prevented people from buying things (increasing demand and indirectly increasing jobs) and companies expanding (increasing jobs). Since government is huge and anything that huge is necessarily inefficient, left in private hands that money would probably have created 200 jobs (scattered all over, instead of concentrated in one highly visible place).

Supporting a government policy because it will “create jobs” is a fallacious argument. If the government really was trying to create jobs, they could do an equally good (well, equally bad) job by paying people to repeatedly dig and fill holes. Since government gets all of its resources from taxing other people, it can’t create anything that they couldn’t have created already. If you’re going to argue that we should have NASA, you should argue not that it creates jobs (as on the net balance it doesn’t), but rather that the use it’ll put the money to is better than the use that the people taxed would put their money to.

By: Miko

Miko — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 19:35:20 +0000

A while back you criticized libertarians for not realizing that some of the things that government does are worth doing. That’s a bit of a straw man. A better characterization of our position comes from your conclusion: “that our grandest triumphs, in dollars, only cost us a fraction of our mistakes.” We have plenty of non-government organizations handling many of these good areas and as the response here to your call for planetarium donations showed, many individuals would be willing to help finance important scientific projects as well. With government, we could still have a NASA-like organization if it made its appeal directly to the public (which, let’s admit: NASA would be a much better organization anyway if it were trying to appeal to the public). We’re a great country precisely because we don’t need government to accomplish these noble goals. On the other hand, I’d imagine that public support for the bad things that government does, such as financing massive corporate welfare bailouts and needless and devastating overseas wars, would be next to nil. Government sprinkles in a few of these fraction-of-a-percent budget items in order to distract people from the massive amounts of bad spending and create the illusion that we’re dependent on it.

By: Steve A

Steve A — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 15:12:03 +0000

@Elizabeth

Forgot to write something about this. It seems like this is not “double counting,” more just putting ideas out there that people can get their heads around. All time budget is hard to grasp. Sending people to the moon, not so much.

What’s annoying is the inclusion of NASA’s all time budget. Why is that group singled out? It’s the only government agency listed. It feeds into the idea that NASA is a huge outlay of the government each year. The other projects are projects, with a beginning, middle, and end.