I really don't have an opinion on this one but when I see statements like this from the government "while reducing the government agency’s maintenance and operation costs by $6.3 million annually", I can't help but think that's meaningless when you've got an $18 trillion deficit.
We could've cured cancer, gone the Mars, developed hypersonic flight, and probably about a dozen other projects that would have had a huge impact. The interest alone is 10x bigger than NASA's budget.
Deficit: flow. Debt: stock. It is meaningful, because even if you can service it forever, the cost of servicing it could have been spent elsewhere, forever. The present value of all future debt servicing payments, taking into account the government's cost of capital, is... $18T. If we didn't have $18T in this debt, we could have $18T in some other debt -- we could be financing $18T worth of something else. I don't know how it's not meaningful.
I am no expert, but I find it better to look at debts credits together. Debt looks scary, but when other countries owe the US trillions too, it balances out somewhat. The net international investment position is an aggregate measure of how much over-leveraged the country is as a whole, and looks much less stark. This combines government debt with citizen assets, which is good and bad - masks federal policy issues, but also accounts for the artificially low taxes in the US and the impact that has on relative wealth placement.
I'm curious as I've only ever seen "<country> has £<bignum> sovereign debt" and the other side of the equation is never really mentioned. But does the value of what the US has lent other countries approach $18T? Seems like it'd be hard to find even a handful of large enough countries you'd want to spread that sort of risk over.
In general, the foreign debt taken on by the US is similar - e.g. bonds issued by various countries, and bought by the citizens and the government as an investment asset.
Curing cancer may not be limited by money alone, there are some things about cancer that make it extremely hard to eradicate. Think of it this way: you can probably reduce the incidence of cancer (but not of all varieties), you can possibly cure cancer with mechanisms that we can theorize about but which we have no practical implementation of, nor do we have a path to such a practical implementation where money would be accelerator to get us from where we are to that implementation (for instance: repairing and/or excising cells using nano bots, easy to think about, very hard, possibly impossible to implement).
Finally, the better you get at repairing cancers the more cancers you will be repairing because as we age our cells copying mechanisms age as well and that's one possible source of cancer. So cure one cancer, cause the organism to live longer and deal with a whole bunch more.
Cancer is to some degree systemic, it is a side effect of the way our bodies work. I'm holding out for a cure or even a vaccin for HIV/Aids but I'm skeptical on a 'cure for cancer', even though having such a thing would obviously be good.
...and rising, and falling, and rising, etc. Short-term movement depends on the economy and on the year of Presidential tenure (i.e. expect more spending in year one than year seven). The total over any decade is unlikely to be a surplus.
Look, if you can't answer the question, and the best you can come up with is "that money is just lots $1 dollars...", you probably deserve what you're gonna get once interest rates go up and you're spending $1 trillion in interest.
Keeping in mind, that compared to the scope of the problem, over 500,000 americans year die of Cancer, our investment has been miniscule.
Compare this to EBola, which, even liberal estimates suggest we won't see more than 100 fatalities/year in the United States, and America has invested $1Billion.
Cancer is a multi-trillion dollar problem - but the technology required to effectively combat it (nanobots, protein folding technology, targeted molecules, rapid-dynamic DNA assessment) is still many decades in the future.
Of course, doing the basic research to develop those technologies is going to cost a lot of money as well. But the difference is, unlike many human maladies (Old Age) Cancer has a pretty well defined solution, we (perhaps appropriately) just haven't invested enough time and resources to deliver that solution yet.
Kind of... To begin with, science jobs pay poorly, and a lot of exceptionally intelligent people choose high paying but ultimately ~zero-sum jobs like law and investment banking. And then there is the continual struggle for funding, which absorbs a good part of the scientists' time and energy.
We could've cured cancer, gone the Mars, developed hypersonic flight, and probably about a dozen other projects that would have had a huge impact. The interest alone is 10x bigger than NASA's budget.