This is so true. I went to Shanghai about 3 summers ago right when Denver was finishing up the "A Line" train from Downtown to the Airport. This project cost over a billion dollars and the damn thing can't run smoothly or stay operational. Tons of issues. Meanwhile we took the Maglev train from the Pudong Airport to the Shanghai City Center. The Maglev cost $1.2 billion dollars [1]. The train can travel up to 270 MPH [1]; it takes about 15 minutes to get from the Airport to the city. The Denver train? 45 minutes, goes somewhere around 45 MPH for $1.1 billion dollars [2]. The train in China goes 6x faster then the Denver train.
And in case anyone doesn’t realize just how far behind US trains are, consider that Japan built its first bullet trains in the 1950s, when they went 130 mph. Today, Japan’s bullet trains have top speeds as high as 250 mph.
The technology to build fast trains has existed for more than 60 years.
Amazing -- they get a Maglev train for $1.2B, and in only 2.5 years of construction[1]. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, we get a [flawed] bridge for $6+B that took 11 years to build[2].
Another example is about Boston's Big Dig.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig
$6 billions with 15 years for 1.5 miles tunnel. What a horrible project!
Sadly it was supposed to be a nicer project, but the person who finally got it under control wasn't at the helm from the beginning. I suspect it would be far better if he had. :(
It's only possible because they built it through the slums, which are essentially in medieval conditions. The train terminates in the region where the people had enough political/actual capital to object to it going through their neighborhood.
I’m not disputing that other communities benefit from unchecked eminent domain power. I see lots of other problems in the United States more fundamental than land acquisition.
Not saying it’s the solution, but giving the government that power might incentivize people to be more involved with local government and demand more accountability. Right now nobody really pays attention to what they are doing.
The US government could build out infrastructure if it desired. We did in the past and we could today. It doesn't meet the profit margins that the MIC can.
It seems like everyone forgets this when these kind of stories appear. Soft authoritarianism looks impressive in these kind of results, but its means are often ugly if not anathema to Western values.
Hitler built the autobahn, a road system that is still enviable to this day—doesn't mean we want the system of governance that guided this project into being.
This isn't a necessary dichotomy either, you can invest in infrastructure without being authoritarian. But I think we celebrate China forgetting how some of these projects are greased through the system and carried out.
Entirely depends on where you are working and what place you're working for. $40/hr is a lot for most of the waiters I know and is significantly more than I made at approximately $10/hr. I'm personally supportive of just raising prices and paying people a standard wage, but those at the top end of the tipping industries tend to make a really solid take home pay.
Waiters and service industry people have done pretty well in every state I've lived in... minimum wage plus tips would equate to $20-$30/hr or more. But I could see it being tougher in states where the minimum wage is far less for service industry jobs.
Waiters and some service industries where tips are expected are not paid standard minimum wage typically. They are paid a separate, lower minimum wage which essentially pays the tax and are taxed on income expected even if they don't receive 15% tip.
In VA that was $2.13/hr + tips, with tips to be declared at the end of the shift. Obviously, you could declare lower tips than what you made, but if the customers paid by credit cards then you could get nailed if/when you got audited; cash was a different story.
If your hours + declared tips were less than minimum wage then they had to pay you minimum wage. That only happened at one large chain I worked at but not at the local, one-off places. Tips were large enough on weekends that it didn't matter much, or at least not enough to risk your job complaining.
The locally run bars I worked at didn't care about tip ratios, but the corporate chains expected you to average 18% tips and would penalize you if you were pulling less than 13% for several weeks -- cuz it either meant you were absolutely terrible at your job, or else you were lying.
and that maglev train is basically a show piece and was considered way too expensive to develop. the high-speed trains in china aren't as fast, but they are still fast, quite cheap, as smooth as the maglev, comfortable, and most importantly, convenient in terms of their stops. so the u.s. is getting destroyed in regional travel options. it's embarassing.
I wouldn't really say that the Shanghai transrapid maglev train is a great example to use, since it was a one-off showpiece thing. Transrapid (the german company) is now pretty much defunct and its test track is demolished. Traditional high speed rail is booming in China.
Well, median income in China is less than $3,000 and in the US it's around $55k. So if their project cost more, that leaves a lot of slack time to engineer the train to go faster.
So potentially nearly 20x more man hours to get a train 6x faster.
- backstops the US dollar as the world's reserve currency, which allows the US to have a large deficit with low risk to its economic system, which basically means the US can ship paper to other countries and they will send real stuff back to us in return. Let's not kid ourselves, this has a lot to do with the US' large military and financial advantage.
- makes opportunistic authoritarian governments around the world think thrice before invading their neighbors. Consider what it would be like if the charts here were moving up and to the right instead of flat: https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace
- ensures the relative safety and efficiency of international shipping routes and underpins global commerce
- provides funding for basic research has lead to many innovations. DARPA, anyone?
- keeps weapons expertise and manufacturing capacity within US borders, which creates US jobs and reduces the capability of other governments to develop competitive arms independently, which keeps them within the sphere of US influence and protection. Other countries look at our military budget and think "we could never compete, let's just buy their weapons, and make nice with the US". Think of what the alternative would look like.
We can debate the morality of the specific wars that the US has gotten entangled in. We can debate the relative size of the military budget, to some degree. But it would be foolhardly to ignore the upsides to military spending altogether.
Thinking that this spending is ok based on your reasons amounts to a tacit acceptance of a huge amount of dishonesty, I find it quite cynical.
This is a totally ass-backwards way to do stimulus and domestic investing, with the upside that it lets you do stimulus and domestic investing while pretending you're not doing it, but doing something macho and patriotic instead.
This is a way to maintain US economic and diplomatic dominance while pretending it's all about Defense/The Homeland/Freedom(tm), all while telling all those soldiers busy getting killed and wounded by (who this time?) and killing bewildered probably innocent (whooo?) that this is all about loving and defending your country.
If you can't openly sell empire to your citizens, maybe you shouldn't have an empire.
I didn't see the part where I said anything about stimulus or investing.
WWII is what enabled the US to adopt this position, and its memory, rapidly fading into history, are why the US chose involvement and leadership of the world instead of isolation. Before WWII the US was (relatively) isolationist. You can claim that it would have been better off staying that way, but given the way things spiraled into WWII, the conclusion of US leaders was a reasonable one: we must lead, or else things will spiral into conflict once again, and we will not be able to contain, control, or ignore it.
How could they come to any other conclusion? They had already tried the "let's try to avoid picking sides and please can't we all just get along" option in WWI and it turned out, shall we say, badly.
None of this excuses the absolute folly of the US' many military misadventures, and likely huge amounts of waste (in terms of people and treasure) in pursuing them. I am merely pointing out that the idea that we could abolish most military spend because somehow the world will just get along by itself, or even that we can just ignore what happens elsewhere, is just not the case and hasn't been for a long time.
If you want a really cynical view: consider that military spending (at every level from large weapons systems down to local spending around military bases), veterans services, and general disability benefits are in some sense the only social spending accepted by a significant fraction of the population.
When I am feeling very cynical, I think of how government spending and pork-barrel politics reflect the same quirk of psychology seen in the marketing of burly SUVs and trucks to the segment that could otherwise be served by minivans and economy cars.
There are multiple points in the parent's post. While I agree that the idea of unnecessary military spending is noxious, the impact of safe global shipping and the unmeasurable deterrent effects for global stability may still be important. It's not clear to me how we measure and assess the value of this vs. hypothetical and more desirable alternatives.
If we weren't maintaining safe global shipping and other elements of global stability on the sly and with a self-serving twist, maybe the vacuum would have caused the global community to come together to achieve the same ends, in a more transparent and less lopsided and brutal (one can only hope) way.
While I agree that sounds nice, my intuition suggests that the incentives and scale would tend to lead towards conflict. It might be interesting to model the stability of systems like this, though it's a hard problem to model chaotic nonlinear dynamical systems. It's not even clear what the state variables should be, but I'm curious if anyone has tried this.
>all those soldiers busy getting killed and wounded
Combat deaths in the US military are lower on average than roofers, steel workers, fisherman, loggers, and quite a few other professions.
So I don't think that argument holds water. There are actually some theories that the specific group of young males that join the military are safer than if they didn't due to traffic accidents and other stupid things that young males do when they've got too much free time and too little discipline.
> US military spending...provides funding for basic research
Someone has to really have drank the kool-aid to even comprehend that statement, never mind believe it. What does military spending have to do with basic research?
If what you mean is that the US has a convoluted, wasteful system where workers work, get taxed, the money is sent to the Pentagon, and physicists at universities have to write out fantasy-laden grant proposals to DARPA about how their non-military basic research work has military purposes, then yes, "US military spending provides funding for basic research". This really got going in the 1970s, I recall one story of a physicist grant proposal for a basic research study into the theory of relativity being presented as research that would benefit small trajectory changes in rocket launches.
You seem to have a high estimation of the idea of the rest of the world on the leash of imperial America (with the phrase imperial America being apropos for your picture). I suppose American academics doing basic research should also be subjected to domination by the Pentagon, in your view.
Japan has a much less wasteful funding of research with MITI. You don't have scientists wasting time writing bogus grant proposals for basic research being reviewed by people sitting at desks in the Department of Defense.
Japan has a large portion of their military spending covered by the United States. It's not a fair comparison. You would need to compare another global superpower such as USSR, Great Britain before the empire waned, Spain, etc. Most of the world's advances have been funded by military resources or wealthy private individuals. I wish it wasn't true because I personally think we'd be better served on cancer research than almost any research into better bombs, soldier exoskeletons, jet packs, etc.
Actually, I agree with you that this is kind of how it works. My point is simply this: the headline number for "military spend" includes a great deal of funding for research:
No, I don't believe this is a great system. On the other hand, consider that if research spending weren't under this guise, would popular support for research allow for the funding to exist at current levels, much less increased ones? Given understanding of the average American of basic science, that would be a stretch (to put it mildly).
Perhaps having researchers write a few extra paragraphs in grant proposals isn't so bad after all.
So you're saying we, the rest of the world, are funding your inefficient military budgets and troops sitting in garrisons around the world, doing push-ups, playing with guns and yelling each other? Had US policymakers little more sense in their heads I'm sure they could achieve the same result (dictators around the world not willing to invade their neighbours) and get actually working infrastructure. But nope, let's waste the money on teaching people how to kill and neglect the actually productive projects for the sake of global "peace". And how's that been working so far?
Sure it's hard to assess how much military spending is the "right" amount and how much US prevents unrest on global scale. But let's not kid ourselves, we'd all be better off if we didn't have to spend money on keeping armies. They produce next to nothing on economic growth or scientific progress. We'd be having colonies on Mars if US had spent a part of that money on NASA.
Yes, exactly. You, the rest of the world, are indeed subsidizing this system to some extent, and in exchange, far fewer of your own young people are sitting in garrisons around the world, doing push-ups, playing with guns and yelling each other.
I won't defend US incompetence wrt infrastructure. But I will observe that "spending more" hardly seems to be the problem, as we seem to do plenty of that already. It's that (lack of) stuff we get in return that's the problem.
As far as global "peace", it is certainly true there is still conflict, but from the bigger picture perspective it's been a relatively peaceful half century.
Again I'll point to this chart: https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace. Consider that the y-axis is log scale, and contemplate the WWI and WWII bubbles at the top.
Hmm that's a good point. There's a power balance that would otherwise be filled with for example European countries spending more on their militaries. So in that sense we are paying you for keeping the playing field safe for others. Interesting thought. Still doesn't change the fact that military spending is more or less money wasted. So is it better for you waste that money than us, I don't know. Probably.
But say what if US had reduced military spending after the collapse of Soviet Union by let's say half, would the world be much worse than it's today? From statistical perspective while it seems that there's causation between US military superiority and the lack of conflicts compared to prior decades, it might be as well that the world has just become less warlike. Sure it would suck if WW3 happened though. Anyway, it's not a reason not to fix your infrastructure :).
Sure we can all acknowledge those are all deeply complex and intertwined facts about the U.S. and its military strategy and spending. Foreign policy, both diplomatic and militaristic, are also not democratic - I think some people just want to call out "the worlds exemplar of democracy" spending the largest portion of its budget on undemocratic means. We The People want to see something more meaningful domestically from our tax dollars and public debts - if the elite know better, then drop the facades.
>We The People want to see something more meaningful domestically from our tax dollars and public debts - if the elite know better, then drop the facades.
I think this is what people don't get about US military spending. From the moment you wake up every single day you are directly benefiting from it as an American. The fact that you, as a normal middle class person, are able to step out of your brand new house purchased with a no money down 30 year mortgage, step into a brand new car you don't own that's financed at 2%, drive to a brand new shiny shopping mall, and buy brand new fancy $200 t-shirts at the shopping mall on your no-limit 0% credit card is because of the fiat-reserve currency system setup by the US fed, and defended by the military.
It is possible for the total poverty rate to get lower, while the rate and absolute numbers of people in extreme poverty (hence the term third-world) increase.
Also, I don't know that I would exactly declare victory on poverty rate based on just recent data. It looks like we've just fought it to a rough standstill from the 70's on, which is disappointing from an advancement of civilization point of view. The 2010 decrease was just getting it back to 1970's level poverty after an increase bubbled up post-2008.
>It is possible for the total poverty rate to get lower, while the rate and absolute numbers of people in extreme poverty (hence the term third-world) increase.
In fact I'd argue this is exactly what's happening. The people who are willing and able to move out of impoverished regions to the coastal megacities are doing much, much better now than they were 10 years ago. But the ones who have stayed are sinking deeper and deeper into poverty as the economy completely shifts focus.
I said that We The People want to see something more meaningful. This would include political policy covering relatively standard democratic ideals: (to keep it extremely simple) health and education.
I am aware our public dollars go towards defending the private-enriching capitalistic system you just described. It is ironic you listed all of those things as "benefits" to me - they are exactly what I am saying I do not want. Public expenditures for private gains? I did not vote for that. I want public dollars going to defending something for the majority, not the few.
> spending the largest portion of its budget on undemocratic means
That is just simply not true. The largest part of the US budget is ~1.25 trillion USD spent on Social Security and Unemployment, after that it's ~1 trillion on Medicare & Medicade, and ~600 billion on Defense.
Make no mistake the US spends wayyyy too much on the military, but it's not #1
And most importantly relative to the article we can debate bang for our buck or what else could be done with some of that money.
One can bring up evil dictators or reserve currency or whatever, but there is lots of waste, irresponsible spending, pork barrel, district welfare and all sorts of other issues. To say nothing of the contractor complex.
The objectives you speak of aren't being efficiently nor sustainably achieved. They are arguably and very tenuously occasionally being brute forced out in an extremely wasteful fashion.
And this isn't a statement on the righteousness of American power projection which is another argument all together.
Basically, this goes well with "America First" attitude. I don't have a problem with it but things doesn't work out when all big countries keep themselves first.
I really enjoyed this post from Reddit[1] that talks about the reasons behind such a large military spending. I personally didn't like how we increased the DOD budget this past fiscal year but this post really puts it in a different perspective.
US military spending was at over 600 billion dollars in 2017. This is more than a third of worldwide military spending. It is also more than the combined spending of at least China, Saudi, Russia, India, the UK, France, and Japan.
It is the guilt we feel for sending poor people to die for the interests of the rich, and then abandoning the ones that did survive to subpar healthcare and broken promises, only to use them as political pawns every 2-4 years.
If we all just say "Thank you!!" over and over again, we are absolved.
To give you some context on this, after the Vietnam war many protestors attacked the troops coming home. Many in the US, later regretted this, considering that many of these troops were drafted into the war, and came from some of the most vulnerable communities.
After the first Gulf War, there was a deliberate effort to thank the troops when they got home, which has persisted after 9/11.
To give _you_ some context on this, attacks by protesters on returning troops from Vietnam is a myth. The reason people venerate "the troops" today is 50 years of concerted right-wing militaristic propaganda which serves to deflect legitimate debate by classifying any kind of criticism as being "against the troops".
Ensuring that the poor and impoverished (those who go into service in the U.S.) rebrand their identity to 'patriotic troop' is a very crucial function of military training and propaganda.
People are not generally fascinated by the troops. "The troops" is a political trope thrown around to try to squash any criticism of the military, its funding, its missions or anything remotely related to it. It's a sound bite that conservatives proudly trot around to deflect dissenting views.
Not necessarily. It's a reasonable model, and claim, that there exists some optimal amount of military spending. It's also a reasonable claim (at the very least in retrospect) that the US would have done better had it used the trillions of dollars it spend between 2000-present on education/health/infrastructure over Iraq etc.
A lot of the money spent on wars is not included in the military budget. George W Bush was famous for doing that: he'd put the Iraq war money in the "supplemental budget", so it wouldn't show up in the deficit or the Pentagon budget.
International security is important, and military defense spending is a large requirement for that; despite all the propaganda I personally still view the U.S. and the west as positive forces for democracy and freedom; although certainly I'm no fan of 'pushing' these on other countries; I think it's always better if the benefits of democracy and international co-operation can become self-apparent and lead to self-guided regime change.
But assuming anyway that the spending is a requirement - the question becomes how efficient that spending is, and where the money is really going. If it's being spent efficiently to support defense operations and capabilities, that's great - if it's going to line the pockets of contractors and corporations spun up largely to capture wealth, that's not so great (for many cases it's probably somewhere in a spectrum).
Re-investing whatever efficiencies can be saved from careful economies into both better military infrastructure and civilian infrastructure seems like it'd massively benefit everyone. (although worth noting that cost-cutting itself also has to be done in a way that doesn't impact security; in some cases I can imagine that defunding risky or questionable projects could in fact improve security)
Agreed, completely on point regardless of source. History has proven trickle-down economics to be ineffective, and Michael Douglas' "greed is good" to be objectively false.
Obviously I'm aware that he didn't write it, and that it doesn't necessarily reflect his personal views. I was being lazy, but it's also true that when most people read those words they picture them coming out of his mouth.
Comparing attributing “greed is good” to Michael Douglas to attributing “Soon the world will feel the loving grip of the Pax Bisonica!” to Raul Julia is like comparing attributing “I get no respect” to Rodney Dangerfield to attributing “git er done” to Larry the Cable Guy.
Whenever people talk about failures of government to build infrastructure I can't help but look back at the brilliant Wired documentary on Shenzhen.
It depicts a boundary line between the city and urban village. And government had the power to relocate 150k in a snap to get the development going [1]
How many countries can actually do that? Sure, couple of hundreds of people can be moved but 100k people, I am sure that cause a riot of sorts and project shut down very quickly.
It would be great if the US were to spend more to get better communication, transportation, and education infrastructure across the country... but doing so would require that politicians be willing to prioritize those expenditures over many others, and that they be willing to raise taxes significantly on large corporations and the wealthiest segments of the population. Those things seem unlikely to happen anytime soon.
Although I totally agree we shouldn't have spent trillions on war, I have a question about this whole "our country spent on X rather than Y"
Most of the money CIRCULATES in a country. So it's not like it's one shot and done. The money was paid to some people who then spent it back into the economy and it went round and round. So at most we diverted a certain number of hops of a huge amount of money to a thing.
I look at money as sort of wheels with cogs turning at a certain speed. When you launch some new project, it might pick up momentum by having other cogs spin it up. It can even "grow" in market cap depending on whether increased demand for it drives up the prices for it. But that price can also drop to zero later, as new things come out, eliminating vast swaths of "wealth" in a stock or cryptocurrency or whatever.
So back to my question... money isn't just a one-time resource that a country can spend and can never get back. However, from the point of view of a government, they only get so much revenue per year, so it should be said about the US government and not the country as a whole. The government taxes and diverts money to things that individuals would not do on their own. Fiat currencies allow further powers to print money — before WW2 pundits thought that military activities on such scale were simply not possible to be funded with taxes etc.
Everywhere in the world I go, I see the vast majority of people are regular folks who just want to put food on the table and laugh with their family. It’s the governments and media that whips up all this warfare and propaganda and we wind up paying for it, and people on the other side of the world wind up dying as a result. That’s what the tragedy is. The money paid to eg Blackwater mercenaries or the rest of the military industrial complex probably found its way back to the US economy in short order.
But just saying money is still circulating is very short sighted. Is the velocity is the money the same? Is it circulating among rich or poor?
Taxation is normally for taking money from the rich and spending on the poor. In this case however, money was taken from the middle and lower working classes, and given to the rich stock owners. And the country got nothing in return, not bridges, trains, or roads.
If you give rich people tax breaks and they spend it purchasing and bubbling real estate, your gdp might show good numbers, but money is just circulating among the rich.
The velocity of money returns to normal after it is spent into the private sector again. It’s just one hop for how it is spent. In the meantime the taxed money may be held in some funds, and those funds may be invested in private banks. We really don’t know. The Grace Commission found that hardly anything from personal income taxes even reaches public works. There is hardly any difference if the government burned all your tax money with their left hand (fiscal policy) and printed shiny new money with their right hand (monetary policy).
My point is that the money keeps circulating. Isn’t it short sighted the other way, to act as if it disappeared?
Circulating among rich or poor is a different question - of outsorcing, automation, demand for human labor and services, UBI and so on - rather than spending it on the armed forces. Poor people get paid in the armed forces and go spend that money into the economy too. It’s apples and oranges. I’m saying the tragedy is the bombing and destruction, the money found its way back into the economy.
I don't think the velocity of money returns to normal. Money used to buy a single Ferrari probably circulates less than money used to buy million gallons of milk. This should imply that for higher gdp we must tax the rich and spend on poor.
American defense spending spends lesser on the poor, and the country does not even get bridges or trains in return.
Look, if you traced the money paid to defense contractors vs to the poor you may find that its velocity is the same after a month. Show me that it’s definitely not true. It seems quite plausible.
US Military budget comes from federal taxes which mostly comes from federal income taxes AFAIK and thus the top 1% contribute more than the bottom 90%:
"In 2014, the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers (those with AGIs below $38,173) earned 11.27 percent of total AGI. This group of taxpayers paid approximately $38 billion in taxes, or 2.75 percent of all income taxes in 2014.
In contrast, the top 1 percent of all taxpayers (taxpayers with AGIs of $465,626 and above) earned 20.58 percent of all AGI in 2014, but paid 39.48 percent of all federal income taxes.
In 2014, the top 1 percent of taxpayers accounted for more income taxes paid than the bottom 90 percent combined. The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid $543 billion, or 39.48 percent of all income taxes, while the bottom 90 percent paid $400 billion, or 29.12 percent of all income taxes." [0]
2. Jack Ma is a Member of the CCP. US spending less on military has a direct benefits to China.
3. US infrastructure sucks. To the point it may be barely better than many developing countries. But it has very little, or if anything to do with billions invested in DOD.
While I agree with the sentiment the reality is much more complicated and nuanced.
Both the US interstate system and the Internet came from military roots. Its all about motivation, war and fear of war seems to be great motivators for funding and building infrastructure.
While we continued to fight any and all terrorists in Afghanistan, the Chinese were moving in with mining and infrastructure proposals including new schools et al. (I don't know how real and undistorted the "schools" part has proven to be.) I recall reading about this already, some years ago.
To the extent that reporting was and is accurate, not only were we spending our "blood and treasure" in this war, we were laying the groundwork for Chinese economic and political expansion.
Building part of the foundation for the Great Belt, as it were, and as we learn more more fully, now.
[edit] I should have been more clear: Please mark the article as 2017 as when I read it initially I was asking my self why the WEF was now when it usually is during the start of the year.
> What can the world, or any nation in it, hope for if no turning is found on this dread road? The worst to be feared and the best to be expected can be simply stated. The worst is atomic war. The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth. Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
If you view USA as heavily influenced by corporate interests - waging wars to further global corporate empires seems like a good deal all of a sudden.
Education? Infrastructure? Corporations don't benefit from that. Ruining countries and installing 'democracy' to ensure billion dollar contracts? Great business.
While most of the world still thinks in nationalistic terms - our country vs theirs, folks who run corporations that span across 100 countries do not and cannot think in those terms.
Infrastructure spending has sadly become partisan because a higher percentage of infrastructure workers are unionized than in the broader economy.
Obama and the Democratic Congress delivered a stimulus bill in 2009 that was largely "shovel-ready" infrastructure spending. Because of that, it was attacked by the GOP, who then took over Congress and has proceeded to underfund infrastructure as a means of weakening unions. And of course they're now flying an "America First" flag and wondering why things aren't better.
The power of companies in the political process is easy to overstate. Political movements are an industry unto themselves and sometimes easily overwhelm corporate priorities. The military as a cultural force in America politics is very powerful... military contractors essentially surf this wave. They didn't create it; they are far too stupid for that. It was created by veterans and politicians and the consulting ecosystem that supports them. It is in some respects the pendulum still swinging back from the darkest days of the post-Vietnam War period, when people would spit on vets and call them "baby killers."
At this point in time, construction workers--and especially unionized construction workers--are not nearly as strong a cultural force, so infrastructure companies have a much smaller wave to surf.
That could be changing with Trump, but who knows what is real with that guy. He is all talk on a large number of subjects... he has done what he said he would in trade and immigration, but not even close in healthcare or infrastructure. Ironically for all his talk of America First, Trump's personal attention is focused almost exclusively outward, at allies, trading partners, and immigrants.
You bring up heath care, which is another industry also had a successful role in shaping American politics. It just seems like real estate developers / construction companies could up their game a bit to steer things towards infrastructure projects.
Two years later, and only the House at that. Obama had Democrat control of both houses until 2011, part of that with filibuster-proof control of the Senate.
Would you care to itemize specifics of those "shovel-ready" projects?
While he has a point, it's worth noting that at the same time China's military spending have tripled over the last 10 years [1]. Did Jack Ma say anything about that? Or is he, as a member of the China Communist Party allowed to criticize only US government?
He is an extremely talented person and smart entrepreneur, but it's hard to believe that his US foreign affair statements have no background agenda. It also could be that the main audience for his message is inside China, not outside of it.
It is also worth noting that China's GDP tripled in the last 10 years. In the same Wikipedia article, the second graph shows a fairly flat military budget as a percentage of GNP over time as of late.
I read somewhere that communist countries tend to invest more in infrastructure: communication and mass transit that bring people together and allow information to flow faster, since decision making is centralized. Of course China is no longer a planned economy and this applied more to the 20th century than now.
How about we employ construction workers and engineers to build stuff that makes America truly "Great" again instead of this crap about lets build better bombs
> Much of the defense spending has been largely a jobs program that employs thousands of people
More accurately, it's been a subsidy to the capitalists controlling particular corporations, with strategic distribution of jobs among Congressional districts as political cover (or hostages, depending on how you look at it.)
>He said the U.S. has wasted over $14 trillion in fighting wars over the past 30 years rather than investing in infrastructure at home.
The US spent $14 trillion upholding a world order of free trade and international maritime law which directly benefited China and was responsible for its own export based growth over the last 30 years. We're seeing that global order realign now, with things like Brexit and Trump, but I'm not sure we want a world without the US spending this kind of money.
Would it be a better if China controlled all navigation within the South China Sea? Why don't we just let Putin roll over the Baltics? That's the real reasoning behind US defense spending. Sure you can point to Iraq and Afghanistan line items, but the vast majority of recurring spending is on strategic naval and air forces to pursue long term objectives like this.
> US spent $14 trillion upholding a world order of free trade and international maritime law
I am a huge supporter of the U.S. Navy's freedom of navigation duties. It's expensive, and it's worth it. But carpet bombing Baghdad does nothing for our trade routes.
>I am a huge supporter of the U.S. Navy's freedom of navigation duties. It's expensive, and it's worth it. But carpet bombing Baghdad does nothing for our trade routes.
Every reasonable person thinks Iraq was a mistake in hindsight. Of course it was. But that does not negate the other 85% of all US defense spending which has been a shield against tyranny for the vast majority of humanity. Our support of NATO is the only reason eastern Europe is still independent. Our defense of South Korea is the only reason Seoul still exists. Yes there have been mistakes made with having this level of intervention in the world. But to give in to this kind of whataboutism rhetoric that sees the US as an evil empire, in a world full of Russias and Chinas, is just insanity.
I think we need a citation on money being the cost to keeping those shipping lanes open. We already spend much more than China and Russia combined, it’s not easy to imagine that could be reduced and we could still keep those countries in check. My understanding was the major draws were unending wars and country building projects in the midddle east, with large military spending projects the military didn’t ask for but senators bought them anyways as a distant second.
>We already spend much more than China and Russia combined, it’s not easy to imagine that could be reduced and we could still keep those countries in check
Unfortunately warfare doesn't work like an optimization algorithm. People are irrational, lack perfect information, and are susceptible to psychological manipulation. You cannot simply have a force two or three times larger than the enemy. Maintaining peace requires an overwhelming order of magnitude in force which ensures no one will ever be challenged. That's the entire basis of Pax Americana.
As far as the budget, all that info is openly available. But the wars in Iraq/Afghanistan have cost about $1.3 trillion, or two years of the total defense budget. The vast majority of recurring military spending is salaries, VA benefits, R&D, and maintaining/upgrading the navy and air force.
Um... I know it's part of what the cool kids do. Shitting on the US. But... this is the pot calling the kettle black.
China has been ramping up their own military spending like crazy the past few years. Plenty of articles from CNN and other media "The US should be scared of the Chinese military because of XYZ". Their infrastructure programs are just as bad as here. Difference is, we have actual code enforcement and building regulations that, yes, raise the price and increase in time to build/repair. But that also ensures that you get fewer buildings and public projects that crumble after a few years.
I also find it interesting that a lot of people jump on public transit as a poster child of "infrastructure". The economics for mass transit over large stretches SUCKS. It's one of the worst investments into public good.
Let's take a place I use to live in just 6 months ago, Colorado Springs. It's about 60-70 miles south of Denver. The Springs is a decent sized city (270k population). Roughly 21% of springs residents work in the Denver area. This was evaluated because I-25 is the main road between the two cities and a majority of it is just 2 lanes. Back ups. Oh my God. The back up traffic was so fucking bad. If I had to do a contract in Denver and had to be there at 9am, I had to be out on the road at before 6:45am to make it around 8:45am. That's if there wasn't an accident along the way. Anyways, a cost analysis was done to either provide mass transit between the two cities or give I-25 another lane on a ~50 mile stretch.
So, let's see, that's about 56,700 people that have a nearly daily need of going back and forth. To make it attractive for people to use, it has to be cheaper than standard car fuel costs. Yes, there's maintenance costs that SHOULD be considered. But normal people would never figure that in. That's like expecting people to "Read the terms and services". Driving my Jetta, it's about 4 gallons round trip. Between 8-12 bucks a day in fuel, depending on gas prices. Now, a car provides a level of freedom too. I can leave whenever I want. Go when I want. If you ever relied on mass transit for work (I did when I lived in Seattle and in Portland), you spend a lot of hours waiting. You show up early for the bus to take you to the WES train, which you wait for, that takes you to the Blue Line tram, that you have to wait for, that you then go to roughly where you need to be on foot. Essentially, you save little practical time. Yes, you can read. My answer. Library card and free audio books. Maybe if the cost is $5 for the day between CS and Denver. But more than that. I'll drive. I like sleeping when I can.
Oh and commuters don't run all day. Just the peak hours to and from work. As in. You don't get to "stay in the city for a little while". You have to go. Immediately after work. There's no waiting around. Have to work late? Got to call a friend with a car. You owe him gas money now as well.
Okay, now to the economics. IF, major if, 56,700 people take the commuter everyday at $5 X about 20 workdays a month X 12 months = $6.8 million a year. Let's say $7 million. Every year. Revenue generated. Now, minus fuel. Minus train maintenance. Minus employees. Even a $10 daily ticket only gives $14 million. For a how big of an initial investment? A billion dollar one? Even at half a billion, that's 35 years to break even if all the employees volunteer and the fuel was free. Shit, I forgot about insurance for whoever runs that train. In 35 years, you'd probably need a major revamp again. It's like being on a tram or train from the 80s/90s at this point. Another major cost sink.
But some of those 56k+ commuters, still need their cars. I built custom servers, delivered and installed them in Denver. You ever carry a 3u filled with hard drives? A lot of commuters are manual laborers too. You know, poor, hard working folks. Guys who do plumbing or electrical work. Dry wall. Carpenters. Those are just the commuters that pop in mind. They have too many tools and materials to ever imagine using public transit if their job requires them to actually carry their own gear. Plus, they have to travel around on a moment's notice.
Or spend the $350 million to expand the interstate which nearly everyone uses ALREADY. Logically speaking, what would politicians approve? You think they're going to risk having their heads roll for a half billion dollar investment that SOME people MAY use? Or expand what people ALREADY use?
You can apply the same logic to easily 90% of the rest of the country and come to similar results. There are definitely outliers to where it works. But let's not shoehorn ideas where they don't belong.
In reality though, being in the lead of commuter train technology is a lot like being in the lead of horse drawn carriage tech.
Are there infrastructure problems here? Fuck yea there are. The aging water system is major one. Electrical grids are being upgraded but there are trouble spots. Same with gas lines. Telecomm needs an over haul. Too many cities are also bottle necked on highways. If a natural disaster happens in certain cities, there's only one way out. Plus, just in time inventory causes major issues when these places do get cut off due to flooding. I'm not even getting started on social issues. Legit issues of dealing with foster care, criminal rehabilitation, mental health facilities, etc. Oh fucking hell, what about education? That too is a shit show. But to cry that other countries have "better trains"... seriously? How about we first deal with an aging water system before we shed tears for high-tech trains.
Also, wrong towards "It doesn't matter who says it". It really does. Because the connotations start to pop up. People start to bring up what that person "does right". It burns my ass that yes, the right conversation finally starts, then red herrings out to some bullshit territory like "more mass transit". No. We don't need that. We shouldn't solve Chinese problems in America. Trains are not our damn focus. Let's not forgot, they are sinking in debt just as bad as us. They've postured for a long time of being a "cash society". That little fairy tale is unraveling on them. They're not magically better. Factories closing. Human rights violations up the wazoo. Let's not miss how xenophobic they are. You think non-Han Chinese have a wonderful time? Hell, there's a government program to end their own Muslim communities in the western parts. They have, essentially, government minders that report on their non-party-approved activities. A forced assimilation program in essence. Oh, and that island that was "always there and always Chinese territory".
It's also funny, "invest in the Mid west". Really? I thought you all hate the mid west for mostly voting for republicans. Now, it's "Ma is right. We need to invest in the mid west" Come on! Seriously? And people also thought we should all politically follow Zuckerburg since he's rich and techie. How'd all that work out?
I'm all for investing into different parts of America. But shouldn't we invest in the Mid West because it's part of America and is struggling and we should help each other out? Not because some rich guy said so?
This got off to rant territory pretty bad. But this is silliness and someone needs to call it out. The comments in HN to this article is a prime example that the one problem this country has is too many people look elsewhere for answers instead of internally. It's complained that companies hire from the outside to lead/manage instead of internally. That thought process is represented here too.
Anyone from the US who has flown overseas to modern, industrialized countries in the past decades will note the aging look of the US.
Given overall industrial and cultural trends, why wouldn't everyone just keep building new stuff every 15 years? This would certainly fit the Chinese regime's policy of increasing GDP. (We'll have to crack the problem of carbon neutral concrete sometime.)
Landing in any American Airport never fails to shock me. Equally the clash between passport control and the commercialism of the rest of the airport.
I was first in SFO in 1995, I'm pretty sure there hasn't been an update to border control since then, and I'm always given a good few hours to study the place.
I haven’t noticed this in my travels. I have seen that the subway and train systems in some countries are leaps and bounds ahead of anything I’ve seen in the US, but what have you noticed beyond that?
This is a crap response. I went to Shanghai about 3 summers ago right when Denver was finishing up the "A Line" train from Downtown to the Airport. This project cost over a billion dollars and the damn thing can't run smoothly or stay operational. Tons of issues. Meanwhile we took the Maglev train from the Pudong Airport to the Shanghai City Center. The Maglev cost $1.2 billion dollars [1]. The train can travel up to 270 MPH [1]; it takes about 15 minutes to get from the Airport to the city. The Denver train? 45 minutes, goes somewhere around 45 MPH for $1.1 billion dollars [2]. The train in China goes 6x faster then the Denver train.
So, tell me again how the Chinese infrastructure is not good?
Hmm yes, this is exactly the same sort of situation:
> WSDOT announced on December 21 that it would not resume Amtrak service on the Point Defiance Bypass until positive train control is implemented in 2018.
"But America has also had train crashes" is a typical response in this sort of situation, but also typically irrelevant.
As a software engineer, I knew the bug in every software is inevitable. What we should do is learning from each bug and try to find a solution to avoid repeat the mistake, either by some engineering process, or more tests. And blindly blame the engineer who wrote the codes is stupid.
Curious—have you ever actually been to China? Those exist, but a lot of the infrastructure is used a hell of a lot more than most American infrastructure, where passenger trains are so crappy nobody rides them except in a handful of cities, and vast, usually empty roads are covered in potholes.
This kind of blind exceptionalism is exactly why nothing ever moves here. We are stuck in 30 years ago of "we're so much better than everyone" that we're refusing to see how our lead has quickly worsened, and also attacking the messenger's background instead of taking the message to heart.
I think we're still leaders in education, for example, but that's under threat.
China has built thousands of miles of high speed rail in the past 10 years, and the people are using it like CRAZY. There are months-long waits if you want to take the Beijing-Lhasa train, for example.
Yes there's definitely what you're talking about. But I'd rather be lamenting overbuilding than the lethargic underbuilding (or no-building) we have going on in the US.
> We are stuck in 30 years ago of "we're so much better than everyone" that we're refusing to see how our lead has quickly worsened
Those who have lived through the scares geopolitical threat of the Cold War in the 1970's, and the economic threat of Japan Inc. in the 1980's can be a little more circumspect about the growing Chinese "threat". I don't have illusions about "we're so much better", but we do have something special. Market driven economies and stable liberal democratic structures have served us quite well, from the explosion in growth in the Netherlands in the 17th century, through the expansion of Great Britain in the 18th and 19th and down to the United States in the 20th. That Western Europe would rather pay for a social safety net rather than an expansive military is a public choice.
Should the US invest more in infrastructure? Possibly. At the same time, I'm skeptical to things that have a whiff of industrial policy and central planning, it really hasn't worked as well for those who have embraced it.
I agree with that in general, by the way, at least in theory. But those institutions have been tested like crazy in the past few years, to the point where fundamental things are changing (some immigrants going to other countries like Canada, etc).
I just think it's depressing to think that we've built zero miles, ZERO miles of high speed rail in 10 years, when China built 8,000.
Let's be realistic, it's China's embrace of capitalism through Special Economic Zones that's truly led to their vibrant economic growth. So I'm not advocating for central planning. I'm just saying that resting on our laurels based on the idea that America was once so far ahead, without realizing that we're not THAT far ahead anymore, is a mistake. (seems like you're saying similar things though)
In the last fifteen years, the Beijing subway went from a laughable toy with only three lines to the largest subway system in the world. Despite this rapid expansion by an order of magnitude, the system remains extremely busy, with rush hour trains so crowded you can barely move, and off-peak trains still full of people. This pattern is repeated all over the place. “Ghost cities,” if real, are the exception and not the norm.
The US has profited immensely from "building stuff to build stuff" back from the new deal programs in the 30's, wartime factory infrastructure investments in the 40's, as well as massive infrastructure buildout of the highway systems, water and sewers, etc. in the 50-60's. I think coasting on a lot of that build out is what allowed lower than typical infrastructure expenditures for many decades, but also gave us (and our political/business leadership that grew up in those years), a warped low view of how much infrastructure investment is reasonable.
It is totally true that we have wasted trillions on wars we will never win at the expense of improving our infrastructure which is very clearly inadequate.
It is true that our education system (pre college) sucks.
It is true that we don't enable people who don't have money to succeed.
Most of what Jack Ma said was true. Do I think that the Chinese have all the answers, that the Chinese infrastructure projects are all value adding, that the US should behave like China, or that China should take a larger role in the world? No, but that has nothing to do with the truth value of Jack Ma's statements.
Despite a pretty spastic and often misguided foreign policy, the US human rights record is much much better than other large political entities (i.e, USSR, China, etc).
it all depends on one's perspective. the US has done awful things to its citizens, they just aren't as amplified by our propaganda mills as the wrong doings of our political enemies.
> the US human rights record is much much better than other large political entities
While the US treats its own residents better, their human record rights abroad is much worse. If China started the war in Iraq instead, all news outlets would have called it as genocide. The US basically toppled a ruler of a stable country, gave the "good side" a bunch of guns, and told them that anyone who opposes them is evil. Inevitably, the two sides fight and kill each other as well as hundreds of thousands of civilians. The US just feigns surprise and shrugs their shoulders.
While this may be an unfair summary of the war in Iraq, this is about as much nuance as American news outlets give to Russia's war in Ukraine or China's treatment of Uyghurs.
Good idea for whom is what you should be asking. That money wasn't burned, it was sent to the bank accounts of major stockholders in Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Halliburton etc... Lets be very clear, there are people who benefited and still benefit greatly from US Military spending.
As there are people who benefit from bank robbery. After all, the money is still around to be spent by the bank robbers.
But it's still theft from the system and is a transfer of purchasing power from those who produce to those who do not. Or in case of military contractors, from those who produce to those who destroy. Professionally.
Have you seen the footage of bombing of ISIS cash dump with US currency flying out? Guess the pallets of dollars going over there for reconstruction was the source.
It's a waste. Waste of spending, waste of effort, waste of resources. The human effort and material spent on that endeavor could have done a lot for this country.
Also morality aside, if we are empire, if we are going to police the world, we are doing so in a very unsustainable fashion.
This is just what I can't help but see. Maybe I'm wrong. Not really trying to argue but damn, this a big elephant of wasteful effort and resource allocation.
OK, Jack Ma,
what if USA wasn't strong enough to be feared by others? What would we have? War. Pax Americana is probably a great investment, others might want to be thankful (up to a point) as peace has lifted all boats.
Plus, that $14 Trillion was invested in US companies, granted military leaning ones but still the money was put back in our economy. And USA sold and will sell a lot of weapons because of that R & D
The reason why China is spending a lot more on infrastructure than the U.S. is because they didn't have a lot of infrastructure to begin with and if they want some they have to build it.
The U.S. already has most (not all) of the infrastructure we need. A lot of what we need to build is to replace existing infrastructure which is getting old but technically still works.
Comparing Chinese to American infrastructure spend is comparing apples to oranges.
Furthermore, if you want to look at where America is wasting money, compare the percentage of GDP Canada spends on healthcare to the percentage the U.S. spends. The difference is likely larger than the 5% or so of GDP we've been spending on defense.
And keep in mind that most of U.S. spending on defense isn't warfare, it really is defense, partly because we have obligations to defend other countries, some of which might be at substantial risk right now (We have no obligation to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression, but we most definitely have an obligation to defend Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia).
Our roads are bad. We lack decent public transportation. Our internet speeds are slow and overly exspensive. We do not have most of the infrastructure we need.
Jack Ma calls it warfare you call it defense. Whatever term you wish to use is fine with me. The trillions we spent on defense in Iraq and Afghanistan certainly was not well spent.
We do have an obligation to defend the Ukraine against Russian attacks. That was the deal they made with us when they gave up nukes in the early 90s.
The deal with Ukraine only requires us to defend them against nuclear attacks, and even then, the only requirement is to seek action in the UN. For conventional attacks, our only obligation is not to attack ourselves.
This is such a common misconception. I wonder where it came from. The Budapest Memorandum is short and understandable. Is this just a game of telephone gone badly wrong, or is there propaganda at work?
The only actions explicitly addressed in the memorandum involve nuclear attack, the other sections point to other treaties that arguably should mandate defense.
Thanks for the correction. I suppose propaganda is at play in the misconception. Also it wouldn’t make sense for Ukraine to not want a better security guarantee given the history between Russia and Ukraine.
I think US has used its military to armtwist other countires or wage a war when they don't agree to their terms. And so far it has given a great economic ROI for the corporations and top 1% at the cost of taxpayer money. System is working exactly as designed.
not sure why you're getting down voted, I think these are some great points. Similar to trying to update a large legacy codebase vs starting from scratch-- it's easier to design, plan, and execute using the latest and greatest, vs. ripping out old infrastructure and systems or building on top of/along side of/etc.
And yes, healthcare spending is unnecessarily insane. Healthcare is tough though because it is not your ordinary product. Is it a right? How do we deal with different levels of care? Politicians don't want to answer these questions. The truth is there is unlimited demand and limited resources in a market where we feel morally obligated to give everyone the absolute best-- an impossibility. Healthcare is just one example that gives me doubts about our political system. Do we have the collective courage/wisdom to make big, important decisions? Sometimes any decision is better than none and I see our current healthcare system as a non-decision-- a "kick the can down the road".
What scares me about China is their gov't's ability to make these decisions (whether right/wrong, regardless of consequences) and get shit done as well as their people's staunch nationalism, essentially, our weaknesses. I do think that western values of freedom and transparency win in the long game, I just hope that the free nations can stay in the game long enough to win.
On that note. I think we need to get better at being a country--politically, economically, etc. We need to work on inefficiencies in the markets: monopolies, corruption, and players in comfortable positions because they've gamed the system. The free market should be uncomfortable for all players. Constant competition is what we want. Unfortunately, as players in the free market win, they gain power and alter the rules of the market so it is no longer free/efficient. We can't fault them for these self-preservation tactics, hell we view them as individuals right? (corporate personhood, Citizens United, etc). At the same time we need to seek out and prevent these cancerous tendencies. In addition, don't let corporations get too big too fail. Let corporations that are no longer fit, die!
I watched that Crouching Tiger series on youtube and while I recognize that it is a bit alarmist, it's tough to ignore the facts.
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/go_east_young_man/2005/03...
[2] https://pagetwo.completecolorado.com/2016/05/31/otoole-takin...