I am not denigrating the military in any way, nor do I underestimate its importance. However, the military is by far the largest single place where our money goes. I used it as an example of better places to look for places to trim money over NASA, the budget of which is a tiny fraction of the military's.

If you are running out of room on your hard drive, for example, you can delete all the text files you want, and it will take hours. However, deleting a single image file will dwarf the amount of the text files, and take a few seconds.

I have no desire to cut flesh from the military. However, I am quite sure there are places where the budget could be trimmed without affecting the quality of our defensive and offensive capabilities.

You may note I also said that Americans spend roughly the same amount on their pets every year as NASA's budget. Add in cosmetics (a several billion dollar a year industry) and you can see that we spend money on far less important things than NASA.

My point: there is money to go around, more than enough to do what we need. The problem isn't amount, it's targeting.