We could all develop our own individual wish list about how public resources
(i.e., tax dollars) should be spent. The reality in this country, however,
is that *politics* is the process that decides how limited public resources
are allocated among (almost unlimited) competing interests. Like it or not,
or agree with it or not, the federal budget is the resultant of that
collision of interests. The question of whether public funds are better
spent on missions to Mars or on dinosaur paleontology (or on health care, or
war, or economic development, or whatever) is fundamentally political.
When current politics get drug into a thread about dinos,
something's gone 'orribly, 'orribly wrong!