We live in a financial world where banks magic up funds all the time and nobody bats an eye, but governments can’t do it for projects?
Further, imagine trying to calculate the added GDP for all of a nations infrastructure over the years its existed and been in use for free or near free. Yes, there are taxes levied in fuel transactions, but clearly that’s not the entire value added.
Edit-Deficit hawks are really arguing against deficits in the secret search for forcing the economy to be zero-sum and punitive. Governments job is to create and reinforce property rights, amongst other things. They do that by creating a resource allocation system - thankfully capitalistic for the most part. Capitalism only exists at this scale with currency - that only the government authenticates. Etc etc. The governments debt is a reflection and indicator of the value its left in the market. Back to nap time.
You could probably sum up much of your statement as self-sabotage, since that seems like all the rage nowadays (politically and monetarily speaking).
What I told people was that Seti@Home was a waste of time, but Mersenne Prime finding was a useful idea:
"GIMPS, founded in 1996, has discovered the last 17 Mersenne primes."
Note that deficit could be (or not) inflationary, but debt is the accumulate of money already spent in the economy.
The US deficit is over $1 trillion a year. The debt is over $23 trillion.
Your knee-jerk reaction was half right, by the way: I'm somewhere in Europe where billions and trillions have different meaning.
It makes sense to increased research funding now that they have a long list of newly discovered planets to target, but what other scientific endeavors do they retire to open up any meaningful government funding?
With trillion dollar deficits in the forecast, earmarking new money does not sound like an easy task to achieve.