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by jjoonathan 2447 days ago
> That is not how inflationary comparisons work

Right, but normalizing to the price of bread and milk is even more ridiculous than normalizing to the federal budget, which is not excellent for this purpose, as you point out.

In any case, thanks for digging up more numbers.

I stand by my claim that money (and enough assurance of continued money to bet everything on one large project) is key.

2 comments

> normalizing to the price of bread and milk is even more ridiculous than normalizing to the federal budget

No it's not. Maybe normalize to the median income if you don't like bread and milk, but how much the government spends on education, health care, interest, military fleets, farm subsidies... that's not relevant to NASA's budget.

> Right, but normalizing to the price of bread and milk is even more ridiculous than normalizing to the federal budget, which is not excellent for this purpose, as you point out.

The CPI is composed of much more than that: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2016.pdf