It's easy to throw these big numbers around, but do you ever stop to consider the actual cost? Let's do some back-of-the envelope calculations to help us consider the human cost of a 5B telescope.
The Median US household income is ~68,000/year[0]
The Average income tax paid by someone in the 50-75K income range is $4,600/year.[1]
The average working career is probably around 40 years.
5,000,000,000 / 4,600 / 40 = 27,173
To fund a $5B project, 27,173 people (more, actually, since this is household data) could have worked for their entire working lives, with every dime of federal income tax being spent on that one project!
I agree that the JWST is a worthwhile project, but let's not pretend that it's a bargain.
I think that NASA's budget, unlike many other federal agencies, is actually highly beneficial to US Taxpayers due to the large amount of IP/new inventions generated. Similar to DARPA, there are huge ROI factors that come in from an organization that researches, conducts science and engineering efforts on a massive scale, resulting in technologies that consumers can use economically.
Due to the huge amount of technologies generated, and refined from these large prestige missions, I do not consider them to be a waste of funding.
One great example are the weather satellites generated by the NASA/NOAA partnership, such as GOES-R, and JPSS, and their predecessor missions in GOES & POES, to name a few. While they are very expensive they equip meteorologists with the rich data needed to make accurate observations. These observations directly impact human life, both by guiding evacuation decisions, knowing tornado tracks, and also, farming decisions. This same data is used for supply chain management, and there are a number of other uses for it.
Although many commercial media sources will be happy to provide you a weather feed, they often do not tell you that they have a backend connection to NASA, NESDIS and NWS, in order to provide their own weather data, or data from a research satellite. Or they'll provide you a customized photo which is actually a tailored version of imagery from GOES-*.
Because of the incalculable costs of an earth impacting asteroid, or a Carrington-dwarfing electromagnetic storm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event , outward looking to see more of the cosmos is one of the best things we can do to ensure our survival as a species. The more we look out, the more we are able to prepare for such an event.
The Median US household income is ~68,000/year[0] The Average income tax paid by someone in the 50-75K income range is $4,600/year.[1] The average working career is probably around 40 years.
5,000,000,000 / 4,600 / 40 = 27,173
To fund a $5B project, 27,173 people (more, actually, since this is household data) could have worked for their entire working lives, with every dime of federal income tax being spent on that one project!
I agree that the JWST is a worthwhile project, but let's not pretend that it's a bargain.
[0]https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-27... [1]https://www.fool.com/taxes/how-much-does-the-average-america...