Is un-funding Nasa short-sighted?

When and if man truly "reaches the stars", and by that I mean is able to garner and consume non-Earth resources (and no, capturing the sunlight that falls on the Earth doesn't count, nor does mining asteroids), will the total wealth (in the "human economy") increase, especially in such a way as to make some of our current non-trivial problems of no import? Or is there some ameliorating effect whereby total wealth is fixed, even in a non-closed system? 

The discovery of "the new world" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World) seems like a relevant and useful analog. Certainly the initial costs of discovery and startup were paid back in spades. Whole countries (and plenty of individuals as well) got rich. It would not be stretching the analogy to say that all of the equity, goods, and services produced by the United States alone in it's whole history are net new value to the empires of Europe. 

But we can't be so hasty. Is Europe better off, on the whole, and in orders of magnitude dictated by this windfall of epic proportions? Bashing countries  is not in scope for this essay. And there are enough other vectors of intervening history so as to invalidate any detailed comparison. Suffice it to say that they did not all live "happily ever after".

So are we to conclude that investing in our long-term future is a bad idea? Going back to the New World, history teaches us over and over that even though literally doubling the size of our known and reachable universe is not a sure-fire prescription for the end of all human suffering, it does tend to lead to "progress" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress). Progress is not the same thing as ending starvation. It's an important component of resolving these big issues however.

The truth is, our nature makes solving these big problems hard. And that won't go away just because we find a new "unlimited free energy source" for example. I'm going to leave this open-ended, because I've got the question, not the answer. However I'll add one last thing, which is a favorite opinion of mine I like to think about, and a wider principle undergirding my argument here. And that is a principle I see demonstrated over and over again in the short history of our current technology acceleration. Here I will express it as, most likely, the myriad of crushing problems that we have no doubt directly created through our own ignorance, pride, and avarice, will not and cannot be fixed by anything currently at hand. However even though they should certainly easily and utterly destroy us, there's a very good chance that we'll come up with something else soon, that will allow us to easily circumvent them and continue on (to the next chapter, which will be the same as the last but bigger). I can put this much more succinctly, and perhaps I should have at first. And that is, our capacity for creativity appears to just barely outrun our capacity for stupidity, at least so far.