Pluto trip thousands of times cheaper than some questionable government expenditures

NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto, a spectacular achievement in space exploration that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago, was a great success at a pretty cheap price.
According to Vox, the whole mission cost about $700 million, which sounds like a lot. But that's about $46.7 million per year for the 15 years in which scientists designed, built, and steered a probe to Pluto, 3 billion miles away.

(You can take a look at this: 7 reasons why the New Horizons Pluto mission is a big deal)

The folks at Vox point out that, compared with some other government expenditures of a dubious or wasteful nature, New Horizons’ price tag was a relative bargain.

So, “inspired by the excellent blog Things That Cost More Than Space,” Vox came up with a list of six things we spend public money on that are much more expensive than the Pluto project.

Topping the list is the F-35 fighter plane, which will cost 2,142 times as much as the Pluto mission.

“Development of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has spiraled out of control, escalating to an estimated cost of about $1.5 trillion over the course of 50 years for a plane that may or may not provide an upgrade over the aircraft it's designed to replace,” Vox reports.

No. 2 -- Improper Medicare payments cost almost 1,000 times as much each year as the Pluto mission.

“In 2013, Medicare made $45.7 billion in what the Government Accountability Office calls "improper payments." These are a mix of payments sent to the wrong people, accidental overpayments, and, to a large extent, outright fraud.”
And at No. 3 -- NFL football stadiums cost taxpayers more than five Pluto missions.
Since 2000, U.S. taxpayers have spent an estimated $3.9 billion on football stadiums for profitable, privately held NFL teams.

I would certainly add to the list U.S. cotton subsidies, which have the taint of operating similar to corrupt farm subsidy programs overseas, except that critics say they generate disastrous global effects on top of their domestic consequences. According to the Washington Post’s “Monkey Cage” blog, U.S. taxpayers shell out $3 billion to $4 billion per year to finance the government’s program to keep a few thousand big cotton farmers rich. The policies depress world cotton prices and reduce the incomes of millions of small cotton farmers in some of the world’s poorest countries, including Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

Those annual U.S. subsidies would pay for 75 missions to Pluto.