[dredmorbius]

Economic allocation means that if you're not spending time and treasury to one end, you're spending it on another. Now, if you want to advocate private-sector spending as opposed to public, that's fine. However economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources.

The comparison of budgets among different programs is helpful to provide perspective (though both TSA and NASA are minor components of the Federal budget overall) -- 0.22% and 0.5% respectively -- the US Federal budget is huge: http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/newsgraphics/2011/0119-...)