You all know how NASA eats up a huge portion of the federal budget, and that’s why we need to cut lots of NASA fat [1], right? Actually, that’s a misguided public perception–many people assume that NASA accounts for 20% of the federal budget. In reality, NASA only accounts for half of one-percent of the federal budget; for this past year, the NASA budget amounted to $20 billion. [2]
What else can you get for $20 billion? How about this? According to Steve Anderson, a retired Brigadier General who was General David Petraeus’s chief logistician in Iraq, the United States spends $20 billion every year air conditioning U.S. military tents and other temporary living quarters in Iraq and Afghanistan. [3] Two starkly unnecessary wars, and even a small portion of the expense of these wars equals the total budget for NASA, which, for decades, has inspired all rational-thinking people with its space exploration missions.
Priorities like this force me to conclude that our leaders are functional psychopaths. [4]
Addendum 2012:
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