Why does so much money go to space exploration when that money could be used to help feed and clothe needy people?

Answer 1

Space exploration is certainly expensive. The thing is, space exploration provides a lot of people with well-paying jobs, whether you are a professor teaching the next generation of astro-physicists, or you own a small sub-contract company that makes rubber tubing to NASA specifications. NASA, by the way, employs many, many more people who make their widgets than it employs as "rocket scientists." The problem is, it's quite cheap to build a house in labor terms. A carpenter makes maybe 30,000 dollars a year. Maybe a plumber or a roofer makes about the same. These are just best guesses, and I'm sure some make more and some make less. But a software developer makes 100,000 a year easily. So does a CAD image processor. The project manager makes 180,000. So you are now employing comparatively low-paid carpenters and plumbers, but you have just made everyone at NASA, and all their subcontractors ...lets say 100,000 people...unemployed, and their mortgages are due on Friday. If you are a carpenter working for House the Poor, you will probably just move on to the next project when you are done. But what are you going to do if you only make 30,000 a year, but your company has only one market to sell its products to, and that was NASA? Where will you work next? Let's say that the total taxable earnings for everyone involved in your massive House the Poor campaign comes to 50 million dollars, which isn't THAT much because nobody makes really big dollars in the house building business (unless you own the company that gets the contracts and hires the labor). And let's assume that the total taxes paid on those earnings was 10 percent, or 5 million dollars. But everyone who used to work at or for NASA made 700 million dollars, so you have just lost 70 million dollars in taxes and made 100,000 people unemployed, so next week they will all be signing up for welfare and some will be looking for a job in Alabama as a Martian Hydrologist. So he'll probably be out of work for a while. The problem is not that we need to kill NASA in order to feed and house the poor. It is a question of political will. We need the high-paying jobs for smart people at NASA and for all the smart people coming along next. But we could afford NASA as well as afford to build a thousand condos and give them to anyone who qualified by being a single parent making less than 15,000 dollars a year. Just give the house away; maybe charge 100 bucks a month so the city doesn't have to pay for the sewage or garbage pickup out of regular taxes. The truth is, that this country is awash in money, but there is no political will to give any of it to the poor, especially in a Republican government. So really, the question you should be asking is "Why, if we can afford NASA and an expensive foreign war, can we not give away housing, food and clothes to America's poorest 20 percent without making them feel like beggars? And the answer to that question would be "We could." But we won't. Not because we couldn't do it, but because we don't want to politically.