It's extremely and utterly odd, to me, that so many people single out things like the Apollo Program as an 'extravagance' when this was also the era of the Vietnam War. The
entire Apollo program cost $178 billion in 2022 dollars. The Vietnam War cost more than $1 trillion, and that's if you put a $0 price tag on the millions of people killed, to say nothing of decades more of people being maimed and killed by our cluster bomblets left all over the country.
The Vietnam War had absolutely 0 value. We hyped it up as some do-or-die necessity, we invaded, participated in the killing of millions of people, blew a trillion dollars, lost the war, went home, and there was no grand catastrophic change. We could have just skipped to the end by not getting involved in the first place. By contrast one can argue about the exact value of the Apollo Program but it's absolutely undeniable that there was value. We learned a bunch, showed what's possible with human ingenuity, and just plain old did something that would make one proud to be a human, let alone an American at the time. If we did more things like this, it's very likely that the relationship between the people and the government would be far better than it is today.
The Vietnam War had absolutely 0 value. We hyped it up as some do-or-die necessity, we invaded, participated in the killing of millions of people, blew a trillion dollars, lost the war, went home, and there was no grand catastrophic change. We could have just skipped to the end by not getting involved in the first place. By contrast one can argue about the exact value of the Apollo Program but it's absolutely undeniable that there was value. We learned a bunch, showed what's possible with human ingenuity, and just plain old did something that would make one proud to be a human, let alone an American at the time. If we did more things like this, it's very likely that the relationship between the people and the government would be far better than it is today.