Wow, you appear to live very close to me as well! The intersection at Fair Oaks and the 101 South exit is HORRIBLE. I've written the city about it several times. In addition to short yellows, there is a serious bicycle safety issue.

  I ride my bicycle through that intersection in the mornings to work. There is NO guided-left turn for any of the 4-way intersection, yet the people taking a left from Fair Oaks to try to make the IMMEDIATE exit onto 101 pay no attention to right of way. I've almost been run into multiple times by folks who don't realize that traffic going STRAIGHT through the intersection have right of way over folks trying to make a left!

I ended up altering my bike route to instead go over a pedestrian overpass and go an extra half-mile rather than continue risking that intersection.

Of course, I never, ever heard back from the city.

I see your point, but I have to point out that as of now, the bailouts have never put anything directly into the treasury either - so both NASA and the Bailouts have never put anything into the treasury. While the bailouts may, they also may not.

My chart doesn't really compare NASA to the bailout as much as it illustrates where NASA is prioritized according to other federal spending, and by what margins. The reason I created it is that I get tired of hearing people talk as though cutting the space program (which to them means "NASA") would solve our financial woes. It won't.

NASA in entirety is .5% of the discretionary budget (.15% of total budget). While cutting funds to NASA would make as much of a difference to the budget as cutting funds from any other federal agency, there is a lot less room in NASA's budget for the cuts compared to other agencies which have equally nebulous direct benefit to the taxpayer.

Are $2.4 billion in military aid to Israel or $1.3 billion to Egypt returning any net to the treasury, or a tangible benefit to the US taxpayer, even indirectly?

Look, I understand that not everyone values Science research and space exploration, or believe that they should be done by the government. However, for nearly every tax dollar you can point to NASA spending, there's likely some indirect but tangible and provable positive gain to our country, citizens and economy that have resulted from it. Meanwhile, there are programs of dubious value spending as much or more money than NASA which get a complete pass on the pinata whacking party, and it is very sad to be on the receiving end of the stick, knowing that.