The total cost of starliner (including Boeing’s expenses beyond what NASA paid for) is about $6.7 billion over the last decade.

We spend several hundred times that on education and poverty eradication every year.

Umm, spread across 330 million people in the US, $6.7 billion would amount to a UBI of about $20 per person. Since it's over a decade or so, that's about $2/year/person.

Hardly enough to even be noticed, let alone make a difference.

The argument "we shouldn't go to space before solving problems on earth" is only for people who don't understand actual large (budget) numbers. Unfortunately, this is a very large portion of the voting population. (And, no I am not saying that $6.7B would be meaningless if deployed in a program with effective results leverage, or that we shouldn't demand better than Boeing is giving us, only that the soace & science initiatives are worth far more than the single-digit-percentages allocated to them)