According to whom?
What can manned spaceflight accomplish that unmanned space flights cannot?
Houston talk radio is amazing on this. For 364 days a year, it’s “Cut all government spending!”
Yesterday, this was the discussion and the message was “We need this government spending, because I work there!”
Some government spending is more important than other government spending. We have gotten to the point where we have one shipyard that can build nuke carriers (Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding Newport News, Virginia), and one shipyard that can build nuke submarines (Electric Boat Groton, Connecticut). When NASA lays off 4000 or so engineers, we (The US) will reduce our engineering capabilities even further. The UK had to contract Electric Boat to get their Astute class nuke submarine finished, because they lacked the engineering/software skill in country.
We are heading for the same disaster, with no one to turn to for help. I'll happily pay my tax dollars to keep our industrial base number one.
Second is even NASA with all it's advanced camera technology sometimes if they can sends out a human to obtain a better understanding of a given situation.