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Support For NASA Spending Depends On Perception of Size of Space Agency Budget
MarkWhittington writes "Alan Steinberg, a post doctorate fellow in political science at Sam Houston State University, conducted a study surrounding the vexing problem of how to motivate more people to support increased levels of funding for NASA. In an October 14, 2013 piece in The Space Review, Steinberg announced the results of a study conducted with a group of college students. Steinberg's approach was based on the findings of a study by Roger Launius conducted in the late 1990s that suggested that the American public believe that NASA spending takes up about 20 percent of the federal budget. It has in fact never exceeded four percent, which it enjoyed at the height of the Apollo program, and is currently about .5 percent. Steinberg was testing a notion advanced by Neil deGrasse Tyson that if people knew the true size of NASA's budget they would be more likely to support increasing it."
The public has no idea about the level of US spending. They need to know things like Air Conditioning The Military Costs More Than NASA's Entire Budget. Until they understand that NASA does so much for so little they will never want to expand its budget.
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In the hope that the principles in this study are correct, I made this little micro-site to quickly answer the question: "Why spend money on space when there are problems here at home?" http://www.ridingwithrobots.org/earth
Saddle up: Riding with Robots
There are some things that are best developed by government due to cost, risk and lack of a valid business case for profit that drives private enterprise. Of course, it should be handed over to private enterprise as soon as a business case is found.
How long will it be before there is a business reason to go to Mars? I'm thinking a LONG time.. So NASA is a reasonable expense, if you have the money.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The problem is NASA's obsession with manned spaceflight. The best work is done unmanned, and it's way less expensive. Toss the astronaut suits and use the whole budget for unmanned missions.
Manned spaceflight only makes sense with a huge breakthrough in propulsion. Otherwise, there is no where to go where a human being would be useful enough to make it worthwhile. As it stands, manned flight serves only to fulfill fanboy Star Trek fantasies.
Until then, I will be a techie steadfastly against more NASA spending. Its not just the general public you need to convince, its at least some of the STEM people too.
It's not really fair to describe Social Security as transferring "wealth to the old". By this point in time, almost everyone collecting SS paid into it their entire working life. Most people won't collect more than they paid. You're just paying into the fun what you will later withdraw (...if our idiot government didn't treat SS as a piggybank that they can dip into whenever they want).
Because SS is regressive, you could call it "transferring wealth to the wealthy", as the wealthy are more likely to also collect more than they pay in (due to longevity).
And I find it laughable and sad that the Teapartiers are mostly old white people and if they REALLY wanted what they think they wanted, they'd have to shoot themselves in the pocketbook and give up this notion the the US of A has to have a superior military and go off fighting "evil".
The people you are referring to aren't the real TeaPartiers. They are the Republicans who usurped the Tea Party banner.
Not the same thing. They may think of themselves as Tea Party but they bear little resemblance to the actual, original, Tea Party. Which did in fact want to stop the money wasting and "wealth redistribution".
"And I find it laughable and sad that the Teapartiers are mostly old white people and if they REALLY wanted what they think they wanted"
The TeaPartiers know just that. Most aren't really against government spending, just spending on the Wrong Kind Of People. There's plenty of right wing conservatives (old white farmers) in Kansas and Texas getting agricultural subsidies.
It sounds like you have no clue what prompted the 21 Century Tea Parties in the first place. It is not spending on the "wrong kind of people", it is an attitude that the government is just too damn big for its own good and infringing upon our rights and ignoring the U.S. Constitution as if it didn't even exist in the first place. I suppose you happen to like having the NSA snoop into everything you've ever done, and want to see the TSA come in and search every car traveling on Interstate Highways since they obviously aren't molesting enough grandmothers and toddlers?
Yes, those involved with the Tea Party also know full well that they are shooting themselves in the foot in terms of cutting pork for their home states and wanting the government to be significantly scaled back on all levels, both federal, state, and locally. It tends to have a very strong Libertarian bent and thinking both Democrats and Republicans are screwing up, and that it will take a huge economic redistribution to "set things right again" that will most certainly hurt a number of people if all of those programs are cut. The hope is that if the government is cut down significantly, that those abuses of authority can be much more easily identified and removed as well. As it is, the government at all levels is so huge that many of the current abuses are really background noise.
I will agree with you that the "neo-cons" who have taken over the banner of the "Tea Party" and trashed any real progress that those involved actually tried to accomplish. These congressmen are largely stateists who really do want their their own special interests (aka campaign contributors) to get government money instead of the special interests of the other guys. The whole thing that is currently happening in DC is just churning my stomach and making me want to barf. Yes, I'm talking about you, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. And they're the best of the lot. Don't get me started on guys like Orrin Hatch and John McCain who are complete sell-outs.
A repost of a Google+ post I wrote a year and some change ago:
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From today forward, all federal government expenditures will be priced in "Iraq War Days" (IWD) or "Iraq War Years" (IWY). For quick reference:
Source: "United States Federal budget, 2012" and "Mars Science Laboratory" pages on Wikipedia for budgets, google.com/publicdata for US population, National Priorities Project via "Cost of War" Wikipedia page for IWD exchange rate.
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Something I didn't note in my original post that's probably worth mentioning in passing: Social Security is huge, "bigger than the National Defense budget" huge, but it's basically self-funding because it's a retirement investment paid for by payroll taxes (modulo population bumps, e.g. the post-WW2 "baby boom"). Person A pays in, person A cashes out, theoretical net cost to taxpayers $0.
Range Voting: preference intensity matters
If people knew the budget for the military, would they support it less?