Funding the search effort is no different than funding technology to stop them, if that's the motivation behind the search (I don't believe that it is, I'm counterpointing people that believe that 'it's the life-or-death nature of impacts that make people search' here.)

Ergo, if we really want to survive impacts, we need to work on ways to stop them - our detection is already 10000x further than our ability to stop anything. It's more than good enough for our current abilities to stop anything.