[ExI] jobs created or saved

[Tom Nowell]

The stimulus was $787 billion.

A figure quoted for NASA's peak spending was $6billion in 1966, equating to $39 billion in today's money. That year, NASA spending supported 400,000 govt and employee contractors. So if you double up on Apollo, for $78billion/year (a fraction of the stimulus spending), you could get 800,000 aerospace engineering jobs supported and hopefully something better than Apollo. This would take 10 years to blow the $787 billion unlike however long the stimulus money has taken to spend, and deliver 25% extra jobs compared to what the stimulus did. 

That's assuming doubling the spending of NASA's peak payroll, trying to deliver new space technology at maximum speed.

Of course, if they *really* wanted to use taxpayer's money to keep people in jobs while helping the pork barrel and the taxpayer, they could have just hired all the construction workers laid off by property developers and hired them to maintain and rebuild America's infrastructure, and build new infrastructure right in key voting districts.

Tom