manned Moon can be done with current EELVs clustered
and it can be financed by simply shutting down the shuttle after station - no Shuttle C. The shuttle folks can then be put to doing valuable work on the manned Moon effort.
The public's willingness to spend LARGE amounts (say 5% GDP) on manned space ended with Mariner IV's first pictures of Mars which showed that it simply was not Earth-like.
While there's no there there, at least in terms of large settlements, there is a here here, and a real need to keep the here here real nice.
ep