Tax money isn't drained out of the economy. The money used for NASA goes right back into the economy, since they use it to buy things. Even money to pay down debt isn't removed from the economy since the majority of that debt is held by US citizens who use that money to buy things.
> Tax money isn't drained out of the economy. The money used for NASA goes right back into the economy, since they use it to buy things.
That's not remotely how this works. By this logic, wars are actually free since the money spent goes to defense contractors who use it to buy things and hire employees. We can have an unlimited military budget with no negative repercussions!
To help you avoid this in the future, remember that "the real economy is not money, it is goods & services". Any government spending necessarily takes goods and services out of the real economy and allocates them towards things the government wants done. Some of those things might have a positive ROI, but with government spending there's absolutely no guarantee of that since they're getting those resources through taxes, not through voluntary economic transactions.
The broken windows parable is about causing destruction and then repairing it, which thankfully isn't what NASA is doing. If you read your Wikipedia link you would see that this was never meant to apply to all government spending. To help you avoid this in the future, read the links before you try to correct people.
The fallacy is thinking all money spent "goes right back into the economy" and ignoring opportunity costs. If you pay people to break windows and then repair them, that money "goes right back into the economy" but it's still a net negative.
Government has no mechanism to ensure the money it spends is on things that have a positive ROI, since the money they spend is obtained by force, not by voluntary transactions.
And this thread is talking about the result of that, and quite a lot of people seem to think this "control via elections" thing isn't working that well.
Most democracies don’t have 100% vote share or approval going to one party, so we have disagreements. There are also lots of other elections that happen more often than every 4 years.
The broken windows fallacy isn’t about government spending. The parable never mentions governments or taxes, you have added that piece. Voluntary economic transactions don’t have a positive ROI by virtue of being voluntary. People and companies engage in negative ROI activities all the time.
People and private companies that are reliant on voluntary transactions for their funding will go bankrupt and be forced to stop if they spend too much on negative ROI activities. Governments can just raise taxes/borrow more money and keep spending until the whole country implodes, unless voters stop them.
> it has nothing to do with being private or public
It has everything to do with being public or private. Private companies exist to generate a positive ROI; that's literally their whole purpose. Companies with high ROIs attract massive investment and expand, companies with low or negative ROIs cease to exist. It's a self-optimizing system.
Government programs have no concern for ROI and that's precisely the problem; they just siphon more resources out of the private sector and keep going regardless of whether there's any return or not.
== Government programs have no concern for ROI and that's precisely the problem; they just siphon more resources out of the private sector and keep going regardless of whether there's any return or not.==
You have inserted your personal bias and declared it a fact. Many government programs have ended. Many programs have very specific concern for ROI. Government has an ROI timeline lasting generation-to-generation (see: moon landing, interstate, quantum investments), a company has a timeline lasting quarter-to-quarter (see: SEC filings).
Different entities can also measure ROI differently. To you ROI means positive net income and growth. It could mean patent or litigation protection for a large company.
You're fractionally engaging in the broken windows fallacy.
Every time we pay for something that wouldn't have got done otherwise it comes at our expense.
That's not to say that some of these things aren't worth doing. But there are a whole great many things the feds spend money on that aren't worth doing.
If two dollars go to invading some stupid sandbox and one dollar goes to Nasa and the NASA dollar pays back a buck fiddy we're half a dollar poorer at the end of the day.