Absolutely. The media loves to spread "sticker shock" with big numbers because they're huge in domestic terms.
But in government spending terms they're a rounding error. The NHS in Britain spends £500m/day. State Pensions cost nearly as much. And the NHS is worth every penny, I'm not suggesting we divert funding - but it brings government spending figures sharply into perspective.
If we said "Britain is going to build an Arecibo replacement on Ascension Island. It'll cost £500m and take 5 years", the tabloids would be screaming, even though we're proposing to spend the equivalent of 5hours of NHS per year on the project.
The same is seen in infrastructure like HS2 "OMG, £100Bn, that's mad money". Well yeah, and over 15years that's ~£6Bn/yr, which is slightly less than what the cabinet spends on cocaine in the same period. And then you have a railway at the end of it - unlike Trident (lifetime costs ~£100Bn) which will spend some decades bobbing around, hopefully never used and then scrapped.
Big infrastructure and science projects used to be a point of national pride. Now they're a cause for hand-wringing, with the fifth columnists busy telling us why we can't do stuff like that any more. It's only the politics that's changed. We can afford them.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
