Maybe you're right, we'll see. A good climate for long-term science would be a sustained, growing economy, instead of the bipolar downswings/upswings that we're seeing the last decade.
Otherwise: There is a new upswing, all new projects, talk about going to Mars. Then a new crash, it's all cancelled again.. and so on.
I agree about a stable economy, it's hard to do long term science if available resources keep changing.
I found this graph: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Real+Gross+Domestic+Pro... (Switch it to logscale.) The most obvious thing I notice about it is the totally flat result after 2000, then improvement (but not as fast as before), and now back where we started.
It appears to me that the dent is really small (especially in log scale). What's all the fuss really about? Seems just that politicians are making a big issue out of this and using it as a rationalization to make cuts that they already wanted to do anyway.
Otherwise: There is a new upswing, all new projects, talk about going to Mars. Then a new crash, it's all cancelled again.. and so on.