Actually, that is usually not the case in my opinion. People spend money on the things they want to spend it on. Can you list any major life threatening problems which were solved by our sending people to the moon (something which I myself wanted our government to do)? There were none that I know about. Yet we spent billions of dollars to get there because it was interesting and exciting. Earthquake forecasting research is not very interesting to most people. Yet it is far more important to saving lives than going to the moon.