Gil Scott-Heron is right - but also not. I was reminded of this watching First Man - and I realised that if 1960s USA had not funded a Moonshot, then would it have looked at itself and said "Hey our police force is used to keep 1/5th of our population in poverty through violence and our financial policies do the same. Let's fix that"?
The thing about the space race was not how much money it got but how it was allowed to define problems using measurements to the millimetre and then solve them at the edge of what was technically possible.
They were free of politics because no one had ever done it before.
But politics is itself how we decide what the problem is.
The concept that the US could have spent the moon money on fixing its self is ... a stretch.
But to give in to that line of thinking is to abandon all hope.
Not spending money on space is not the same as spending it on fixing our deepest problems.
Until we can convincingly show we agree on what our problems actually are, I am reluctant to think we can spend billions fixing them.
Instead let's fire spaghetti at the walls on local levels - maybe we can find solutions local interventions first.