Well, I doubt I'm representative of US voters, but to my mind NASA suffers primarily from not having a realistic medium-term mission that anyone (beyond science geeks) cares about and from being a bloated, sclerotic, and highly inefficient government organization. Neither problem can be fixed by more funding.
Sure, but those aren't the problems I'm hoping to solve using this funding. I'm hoping the funding will help solve the interplanetary civilization problem.
(They do impact the efficiency of dollars spent, of course- so they are important to solve. But those are efficiency concerns, not solid barriers.)
"The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is planning ahead — way ahead. The agency wants you to email ideas for how "the Administration, the private sector, philanthropists, the research community and storytellers" can develop "massless" space exploration and a robust civilization beyond Earth."
This is beautiful.
"We are running out of adventures [...] the mountains have all been climbed, the continents explored, and the romance of sailing away on a tall ship to undiscovered islands is no more. What will fire the imaginations of the next generation?"
http://io9.com/white-house-seeks-advice-on-bootstrapping-a-solar-syst-1647619795