The US Federal Government spends ~1 Trillion dollars on various welfare programs per year. The James Web Space telescope program has costed $11B over 25 years. Or roughly ~0.04% of the total amount spent on poverty elimination / management programs in the same period. The argument that "space-exploration is too expensive, we should eliminate poverty instead" is pure nonsense when comparing the scales of the resources applied to those two issues. I fail to see how increasing welfare spending by 0.04% at the expense of the James Webb program would be in any way beneficial.

[1] https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/CRS%20Report%20-...

If $1T is not enough to end homelessness, then maybe that extra $11B would help?

But pulling welfare funding numbers from "The Desk of Jeff Sessions" might not be a good place to start.

https://www.cbpp.org/blog/the-deeply-flawed-sessions-report-...

So no, we do not spend $1T on "welfare" a year. But let's focus on the money spent specifically for helping house the homeless. It is only $2.5B.

https://www.hud.gov/press/press_releases_media_advisories/HU...

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) today awarded $2.5 billion to renew support to thousands of local homeless assistance programs across the nation. HUD's Continuum of Care (CoC) grants will provide critically needed support to 6,597 local programs on the front lines of serving individuals and families experiencing homelessness. See local impact of funding below.

As dang would say,

> "Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

To be entirely honest the answer is probably 0. It is cheap to build housing but there is absolutely no political interest in it. No amount of money fixes this issue because NIMBYs will do everything in their power to block any efforts to meaningfully improve housing.

No need to build cheap or new housing, plenty of places to rent for $600 - $1000 a month. That $11B could house all the homeless in the US for two years.

Without coming off as too obtuse, is your argument that the best return we can expect is from investing in basic needs?

Or that for any investment to be moral we must have satisfied more primal basic needs?

What if it were the case that investment in basic research today alleviates a greater amount of suffering over a longer time horizon? What would the moral investment be?

> Without coming off as too obtuse, is your argument that the best return we can expect is from investing in basic needs?

If the ROI is not letting mentally ill people die in the street is that enough?

>Or that for any investment to be moral we must have satisfied more primal basic needs?

Yes. Why not? Why not make this a metric?

>What if it were the case that investment in basic research today alleviates a greater amount of suffering over a longer time horizon? What would the moral investment be?

We can fix these issues now by redirecting this $11B to the $2.5B HUD budget for homeless grants. What research is needed to end homelessness and hunger? It is not a hard problem, only hard because of the greed endemic in the culture. All these people who think this is a good idea to spend money on are only interested in themselves and they use these grand notion of it somehow helping people in the future to make themselves feel better.

That doesn't matter. Landlords would under no circumstances accept those people as tenants for the same reasons that the government renting hotels for the homeless has been so unsuccessful in the past. Namely the perception that the homeless will destroy their property. This isn't necessarily true but all it takes is a handful of bad examples and suddenly landlords are sceptical at best if not outright refusing.

Homelessness is a symptom of systemic issues, it's not the cause. Fixing those systemic issues will cost significantly more than 11B annually.

Don't get me wrong, I think we should be making those a first priority but scientific projects are not who we should be targetting for poor spending. The research this project will do and the research that most of these space oriented science projects do have the potential to significantly shape our understanding not just of space but of how the world works which has direct quantifiable benefits for industry.

If you want to pick an expenditure to be upset about instead, be upset about how much the US spends on the military. Alternatively be upset about the inefficiencies of the US medical system or the lack of taxes paid by large corporations or any of the other inefficiencies and failures of the US government and economic environment. Any of those could have their efforts redirected towards improving the issues that lead to homelessness and wealth inequality.

TLDR: Scientific research on average pays back many multiples of the original investment and 11B isn't remotely close to enough to even impact the root causes of homelessness. Pick your battles and focus on actual inefficiencies in the US that are worsening the homelessness issue or actual opportunities to increase tax revenue/reuse actually corrupt/wasteful spending.

Most homeless people aren't homeless because they can't find an apartment. Housing is a tiny part of the problem here.