People always say NASA is underfunded, and it is, but we could end homelessness in America for the cost of funding NASA for 11 years. We could also pay for it over 10 or 20 years and it'd increase the federal budget by around half a percent or less. And that's at $400,000 per house which is probably a high estimate although there would be some overhead associated with locating housing in the right places and moving people around.
My point is that this is not an ambitious project. But then, who knows what happens if this eviction/foreclosure crisis is allowed to unfold.
What if there were a bunch of unused houses already in existence? That would be pretty crazy, huh?
Or you could cut the US military budget back to 2003 levels to come up with $240 billion. But this housing project will never happen under capitalism, of course.
That would come up with $240 billion every year. There probably aren't going to be 600,000 fresh homeless people every year. Assuming society doesn't totally collapse anyway, which it probably will.
Alternatively we can spend 320 billion to give everyone $600 once. Yes, surely this is the way to save America.
Or you could use eminent domain to give unhoused people some of the many vacant homes for a fraction of their value. It can be even cheaper
Typically people are compensated at market rates when eminent domain is applied.
In theory, yeah. However, the market rate is usually assessed by government or government adjacent agencies. So often if it's ever close to market rate it is usually on the lower side.
There are 600k homeless people in the US at any given time, it's not that there's 600k homeless people in total or even over the course of a single year, the number is at least 4x that for a single year, and much higher over a 5 year period.
Similarly the prison population I think is a static number but hundreds of thousands more probably flow through in any given year.
Okay, it's a little more complicated than I thought.
How many of those people are homeless multiple times over a few years?
You can take 240 billion away from the military and they would still be getting 500 billion in that year.
NASA's how we know so much about climate change and how we're ruining our planet. Also there are asteroids out there that could hit earth and destroy like entire countries and statistically it's pretty unlikely to land on Great Britain so it'd be smart to develop a way to deflect them eventually (or aim them at Great Britain).
Yeah having a scientific study program funded by the government is good, making its PR campaigns about stupid shit like space exploration is bad. There’s so much in this planet we have no clue about, more to study and to learn, but exploration of outer space has been promoted as the greatest achievement in humanity. While we destroy this one.
It's important to have both applied science and fundamental research. Fundamental research is how we find new unexpected breakthroughs that don't derive from simple iterative improvements of existing processes. NASA and space exploration in general is essentially engineering-heavy fundamental research.
