Not anywhere near 2008, and it is irrelevant regardless. If you wait for the perfect time it will never come, and then we're all dead.
That kind of attitude is the kind that means you're always going to be just slightly in the shit while money gets wasted on fantastical projects. Don't treat the shitty stuff as stuff that's always going to be there, just go and deal with it. Put all your energy into it and when things are easier, go for your space program.
It isn't a fantasy. NASA churns out technological innovation like no other agency and is investing in the future of human civilization.
Economic downturns are a fact of having an economy. "Just fix it" is the real fantasy.
And furthermore, we can multitask. You can, in fact, do everything you need to do, and this is something we need to do.
NASA gets $18 Billion dollars a year and shrinking. The Department of Defence gets $683 Billion dollars a year and growing. If you want to talk about cuts, don't go looking at the space program, because even at its greatest it was never more than 5% of the US budget. They should be getting more on the order of $100 Billion dollars a year anyway.
You are never going to get your perfect time. It doesn't exist.You don't just "go for" a space program. These things take lots of investment to get returns, but the returns are exponentially greater. The sooner we start investing the sooner we can get returns, and the sooner we get returns the sooner we can avert the downfall of humanity.