NASA's whole 2026 budget was 24 billion dollars, a new poverty-economics study puts the real price of ending extreme poverty at up to 318 billion dollars a year, and the math behind 'fund poverty instead of space' turns out to run the wrong direction

NASA's whole 2026 budget was 24 billion dollars, a new poverty-economics study puts the real price of ending extreme poverty at up to 318 billion dollars a year, and the math behind 'fund poverty instead of space' turns out to run the wrong direction

“Imagine what we could do for the poor if we just spent NASA’s budget on them instead” is one of the most reliable lines on the internet, trotted out every time a rocket launches or a budget bill passes. It sounds like arithmetic. It is not arithmetic. Run the actual numbers against a real poverty-economics study and the comparison collapses almost immediately, not because ending poverty is too expensive to take seriously, but because NASA’s bud…