But what if budgets were based on outcomes to be reached, as they were for the moon landing and in wars? What if the first question is not ‘Can we afford it?’ but ‘What do we really want to do? And how do we create the resources required to realize the mission?” For example, if you want new energy infrastructure, you can’t have new hospitals as well. Yet the conventional approach is to assume that budgets are fixed, and so if money is spent in one area, it will be at the expense of another area. There is no reason why a ‘whatever it takes’ mentality cannot be used for social problems. Money seems to be created for this purpose. Indeed, the urgency to win is why money is always available for wartime missions – whether in the world wars or Vietnam or Iraq. And while he and NASA had to constantly defend the use of the budget, in the end the pressure and urgency to ‘beat the Russians’ made the money come through. “Kennedy was clear that the Apollo project would cost a lot of money – and it did.
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