Quote:

Other examples? Well, as much as I am all for exporing space, we spend hundreds of billions in trying to get a remote controlled car onto mars to look for signs of water from a couple million years ago.



"100s of billions" my ass. Maybe over the last 20 years.

NASA's budget fluctuates between 6 and 8 billion. The Coast Guard (another wholly under-funded government agency) has a bigger budget than they do.

The Mars Rover projects only cost a few hundred million.

What they accomplish with that is money well-spent in my book. They're probably one of the single most efficient government organizations as far as direct results from money invested.

The Endowment for the Arts is just tens of millions a year. A teeny tiny pittance in government terms. And yeah, it sometimes goes to bad use, but more often than not is goes towards the creation of beautiful art that will hopefully be more remembered by future generations than some of the other blights we've put upon the world.

Yes, all that stuff adds up to a bit of money, but it's not nearly as much money as you think it is. Evidenced by my previous post regarding decreasing gasoline taxes in which you thought removing social programs would somehow help. You couldn't save 5 cents a gallon on gas by removing every social program in the country.

Like most hardcore conservatives you think that ending social programs or various other programs (like NASA apparently) will be a huge boon to our budget -- when they make up a TINY portion of the overall federal budget (I don't count Social Security or Medicare budgets, as they are most definitely not going away by choice). No different than the Liberals calling for less military spending who don't think about the implications therein or just how much money that it actually would make.

You want to call for something -- call for less government spending period. I don't hear you, or most hardcore conservatives, complaining about government over-spending, yet we spend more just on Interest on our National Debt than we do on all the social programs in the country combined and then some. And that has absolutely no benefit at all, it's just flushed down the drain.

We overspent more this year than the budget for social programs. Meaning that if you took every last one of them away we'd still not have broke even for the year.

Or go after the huge "Discretionary Spending" black hole of money -- as much as 20% of the federal budget that isn't even 'budgeted' at all.

2003 Mazda6s 3.0L MTX Webpage 2004 Mazda3s 2.3L ATX