Please refrain from bringing down the discourse to a "reddit style" battle of controversial sound bites. Something in the scope of a well-elucidated argument/claim (complete with interesting insights and/or evidence) about why art/transportation should receive no government grants, however, might be welcomed here.
The NEA spends 1 out of every 5 dollars on its own bureaucracy, rather than art. Is the NEA good enough at 'investing' that they can justify a 20% management fee? That's laughable.
Nobody seems to appreciate the central contradiction in the argument of this article. People can apparently 'invest' their money in the arts without any guidance from Washington, so why not return the 150M budget of the NEA to the apparently art-loving public and let them allocate it as they see fit?
The NIH is pretty poor at allocating research funds, and extremely bloated. The grant application process is kafkaesque, to the point where most investigators must hire an FTE just to deal with NIH paperwork.
Private foundations (e.g. HHMI, Wellcome Trust) already do a much better job. There's less overhead, less make-work for beauracrats, and overall higher-quality science.
I don't have first-hand knowledge of other disciplines, but I doubt that it's much different. Certainly SpaceX, Blue Origin, Orbital ATK have moved from design to implementation faster than NASA with the SLS (where 3 of every 4 dollars are spent on overhead).
Of course SpaceX and Blue Origin, etc. are working off of pre-existing rocket technology -- that's why I'm comparing to the SLS (which was supposed to be assembled out of mostly existing space shuttle parts).
I don't think it's obvious that NASA was required to create commercialized space. One could just as easily write an essay on the momentous achievements made by private industry and philanthropic foundations.
I dare you to write an essay on the momentous achievements of the NEA and the private sector industries it has generated.
