Writer's Block: Fly me to the moon

[woodwardiocom]

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. . . Have you looked at a breakdown of the US federal budget?

Here you go.

Defense, $782 billion, Soc. Sec. $678 billion, Medicaid/care $676 billion, interest on the debt $187 billion, TARP $151 billion, "other mandatory" $607 billion, "other discretionary" at $437 billion.

NASA's budget lurks inside "other discretionary". It's way too small to break out in a pie chart. Here are the numbers for NASA. For 2009, it was about $18 billion, or 0.6% of the total US budget. NASA's budget has never been more than 5% of the total, and that was when we were putting people on the moon.

Do I think it's worth it? We could triple it and still hide it inside the money allocated for planes the Air Force doesn't want. We could quintuple it and I'd still say it's a bargain.

But even if you think it should be zero, let me ask you: Would you rather save $18 billion by eliminating NASA, or by requiring the military to tighten its belt to the tune of 2.3%?

Comments

[darxus.livejournal.com]

I get the point about the limited resources of a single individual. But I don't buy it. It would take me a few seconds to add three circles to make it no-longer misleading. It would take me a few more minutes to get logos on them to make them match the rest of the poster and scale everything down maybe to fit on the poster in its current size (assuming I had the vector graphics data in a reasonably editable format, which the creator clearly has).

It's a good start, but it's really misleading. Calling it "art" doesn't make it less misleading. It is very effectively obscuring the financial burden of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and the interest on the debt. To the extent it seems intentional.

And I don't think the total debt service needs to be effectively communicated in order to make it substantially less misleading.