Re: Nail on the head.
This argument is nothing new. At the height of the space race in 1970, there was a hit song in America called "Whitey On The Moon" - the point being that poor black people were paying taxes and getting not much share of the pie, while the government spent billions putting (white) men on the moon.
I've got sympathy with anyone in a position of poverty who sees these things as an expensive waste, but I don't believe that cutting research programmes would suddenly mean "yay, no more poor people". In the long term, it probably has the opposite effect.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
