"There's nothing quite as beautiful as the space station and the shuttle that services it, and nothing quite as useless.

Now, that can be said of many things: a balance-beam dismount, a Shakespeare sonnet, a chess problem by Nabokov. But none of these is financed by taxpayers, and none makes a claim to utility. They are there for reasons of aesthetics, and perhaps amusement.
You cannot justify a $17 billion NASA budget or $6 billion for manned exploration on such grounds. There has to be more than that, and the space shuttle never was.
...
But it still brings back science. Humans can discover things through intuition and pattern recognition that machines thinking in algorithms cannot. Imagine the scientific possibilities if today we had humans patrolling Mars rather than the brilliantly programmed but still limited golf carts now roaming the surface.

And then there's the glory. If you find any value, any lift of the spirit in a beautiful mathematical proof, in an elegant balletic turn, in any of the myriad human endeavors that have no utility but only breathtaking beauty, then you should feel something when our little species succeeds in establishing new life in a void that for all eternity had been the province of the gods. If you don't feel that, you are -- don't take this personally -- deaf to the music of our time."
Krauthammer

Linked from http://www.nasawatch.com/

It's a interesting article. I don't agree exactly- for instance I don't think Manned Mars is 100 years from now. Now maybe if we continued NOT going to the Moon, Manned Mars would have been 100 years from now. So I don't necessarily agree on some details, but he has got the big picture fairly good and I wish even more attention was paid by "main stream" commentaries who are in the same league as Krauthammer.

But anyways I'll take the opportunity go over some the details. Why was the Shuttle such a waste of tax dollars? One reason is we spend too much time doing the entire program. It was grossly over sold. It's goal was unrealistic bordering on pure fantasy. And generally speaking one long exercise of trying pound a square peg in round hole. As one conclusion from Columbia disaster pointed out, the Shuttle in fact was never a operational space craft- instead it was experimental vehicle and should been treated like one- and this is part what mean by "long exercise of trying pound a square peg in round hole"; NASA wanted the Shuttle to be an operational space vehicle, they pretended it was, and all kinds of mistakes were made because of this wishful imagining.

Of course getting rid of Saturn V was huge mistake and because the Shuttle was replacing the Saturn V in a sense, and the shuttle program starting with this general idea of replacing it was a seed to a fatal flaw- they didn't start with small vehicle, fly it as an experimental vehicle, build bigger, fly, improve further, etc.
Instead they designed something that didn't work, added to the design in order to make it work, added new goals to it to justify the waste of money and time it was costing, etc. etc.

Now what about ISS. Well, it's design was changed so it's not doing what it was intended to do and in a sense was built the further justify continue having the Shuttle.
One reason you have any station in LEO, is because LEO is halfway to anywhere. There are other reasons for LEO- it's good spot for a "tourist hotel", it's a good spot for a science platform- microgravity, vacuum, and learning about space environment in general- it's effects on material and people. But for a space agency that has as one primary missions to do manned space exploration- LEO as a pitstop to the rest of space is a fundamental reason to have a space station in LEO. That was dropped because of cost and because of choice of inclination [so Russians could get to it].