Bush Space Plan Unwise?

That's part of why I predicted immediately that the Shrub plan wasn't
going to fly; people weren't introduced to it in a fashion that lets
them appreciate it properly.
I try to educate people about things as often as I run into negative
sentiments about space:
During the height of Apollo spending, space never got more than 3 to
5% of the budget, and now it's a small fraction of 1%. We actually do
spend more on junk food, alcohol, cosmetics, pets, illegal drugs,
lotteries and many more things (each thing, individually) than we
spend on the space program.

I'll have to look up the articles and figures, but I believe that
1996 (ish) was the first year that industries making use of the
unique space environment produced enough economic profits that it was
greater than the total expense by all global space efforts that year
(telecommunications and such zero-mass efforts simply using the space
environment as a medium of traffic).

And a more complicated side issue -which should appeal to this list-
is that an ultimate (though actually rather near-term goal) is to
make the space effort economically self-suficient through conducting
much of the activity in space, using space resources. If we can
engender a savings -for instance by producing water and fuels from
NEA materials, then we effectively make a profit. Everything we
launch to LEO which is bound for GEO or interplanetary space is ~45%
by IMLEO the oxidiser in the upper stage for sending it beyond LEO.

Strategic metals from NEAs is also a not-too-far-out longer term
way, with SPS power and eventual space industries replacement of
heavy polluting industries on the ground being the longer term goals.
The end-goal of removing polluting industries from the biopsphere is
the ultimate -not to mention mitigating the risk of planetary
impactors (NEAs are the key).
Eventually, space industries can make profits from goods and
services to drive the civilization's economies to such immense scales
to absolutely dwarf what we today are accustomed to think of as
global economic scale (Read John S. Lewis).

George Perkins wrote: