lets do austerity for the wealthy first. we give them money hand over fist, in fact we've never met a problem we didn't try to solve by giving the rich more money. we currently fund R&D for three private space programs, from which we buy the technologies we paid the development costs for. Lets get down to 0 publicly-funded privately-owned space programs before we start picking which grandmothers we need to starve out
that's great, but it's not an unqualified Good Thing(tm) when we're putting it up against meeting basic needs for people today. We managed to have amazing gains in technology and a functioning state that can care for its citizens in the 60s. Also, this doesn't imply that 3 publicly-funded privately-owned space programs are better than 1 publicly-funded, publicly-owned space program, only that research is good (which was never the issue at hand).
We had significantly less welfare in the 60s. We also had more poverty per capita in the 60s but living standards were rising as a result of technological improvements. Clearly a private space company (spaceX) has dramatically outperformed our public space company at advancing technology, despite being a scrappy startup with a fraction of the funding 20 years ago.
