Are you seriously quibbling about $8bn when we happily spend $3500bn on bank bailouts, or $500bn/year for the military (not including the various wars)?
$8 billion was a huge amount in the science compartment. It is completely irrelevant that some other compartments might have had much bigger budgets.
I would rather shovel billions at universities with little more than an unenforced request that they spend it on pure research, than allow Congress any control over scientific funding at all.
Mainly I just think that drawing attention to scientific funding as some kind of waste of taxpayer money when it is such a drop in the bucket is more about serving the interests of the American conservative establishment in villainizing intellectuals than actually solving a problem.
While you may consider this point unrealistic or unhelpful to the argument, it cannot be characterised as irrelevant. Adding the word 'completely' only weakens your case.
According to the treasury department, by 2010, projected cost of TARP was $30-50bn. That's /two/ orders of magnitude out.
You also handily miss out the multiplier effects of military spending, and act like the government is taking the money and shoving it up the ass of a small animal. In fact, the vast majority is given to US industry and to US citizens. I'm sure if you Google'd you'd find the source I'm looking for who described the US Military as the world's largest welfare system.