Why is a comparison to the cosmetics industry meaningful?
Any way, it boils down to the fact that Americans thinks NASA gets far more money than it actually does. In 2007 polling found that the on average Americans thought NASA received one fourth of the federal budget; the actual proportion was 0.58% http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2007/11/21/na.... This works out to a few bucks per year per person. It's amazing what NASA does with so little.
I wish there was a non-profit that just ran public education campaigns on these kinds of things... general ignorance is the biggest enemy of programs like NASA. Most people don't have a firm understanding of where the government spends its money, the various ways money is collected, and the value of these services.
NPR's finances are pretty open: http://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances . They get about 5% of their income directly from federal, state, and local governments, and 13% from colleges and universities (which an accountant could probably tease apart to government spending and private spending. I'm not going to try). So yeah, they get a bit of government money, but it's not much of their budget, much less the US budget.
I was referring to things like education ads in mainstream media, to counter misinformation and promote general public awareness... people that tune in to NPR aren't really the problematic demographic.
The phrase "we simply need to prioritise what's really important" should indicate that the poster believes there are things that are objectively more important than others, that peoples current priorities do not match that list, and that cosmetics should be lower.
The general public doesn't know who Abraham Lincoln was or who the colonists fought the Revolutionary War against; I doubt that having a well informed electorate is realistic at the present time.
Any way, it boils down to the fact that Americans thinks NASA gets far more money than it actually does. In 2007 polling found that the on average Americans thought NASA received one fourth of the federal budget; the actual proportion was 0.58% http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2007/11/21/na.... This works out to a few bucks per year per person. It's amazing what NASA does with so little.