American infrastructure is failing period

[Guvnah]

@Guilds

@Guvnah

Cut budgets elsewhere.

Where?

Everywhere.

I’ll repeat: We can’t keep borrowing like we’re doing. Soon we won’t even be able to pay the interest on our debt. And God help us if interest rates rise.

[Cratic3947]

No, Obama got his plan and we got solyndra and Chinese solar panels. And Chinese strip mining for lithium. And if you think dems repair roads and bridges come to Cal and see the roads as we are taxed to the max. Pot holes everywhere.

The reps should run on taking the Two trillion and just sending the whole thing back to the people in the form of a stimulus check. That would be over 5000$.

In fact the best way to take apart the fed govt is to just start sending the fed budget back to the people… Use dem tactics against them. Call it a national income and strip the agencies and cronies of their money,.

[Call_me_Ishmael]

@Guilds

@Guvnah

Cut budgets elsewhere.

Where?

Military is the biggest cash cow. Of course, it is also pretty lucrative for the private sector for defense manufacturers…they will lobby like hell to make sure that does not happen.

We did spend $1.5 trillion on a plane that does not work.

You should check first to see where government r&d is spent. Remember ? "The government makes all technology advances happen. "

[Steel-W0LF]

I looked briefly before work but couldn’t find a comprehensive list, but I didn’t have much time so maybe it’s out there.

I’d like to see a list of all the “infrastructure” spending bills over the last 10-15 years, and see what the total adds up to.

My guess is: the total would be enough to rebuild the entire nations infrastructure from scratch.

[JayJay]

@Call_me_Ishmael

Government spends money everywhere they can. It’s how the government keeps those strings attached. Whose money ? The taxpayers’ money. They take corporate taxes and then when they give the money back to the corporations for R&D through various accounting mechanisms and outright investments, you write as though the government did a good thing. Amazing.

They did do something good because oftentimes the scale of certain implementations in order for new technologies to be adopted are such that the free market will never do them on their own.

The free market is a powerful engine of wealth creation…but it is not the answer to every single thing.

[Call_me_Ishmael]

@JayJay

The free market is a powerful engine of wealth creation…but it is not the answer to every single thing.

Its also a powerful source of innovation and invention. Do the initials NBA mean anything to you in the context of r&d in corporations that have government contracts?

It stands for “new business acquisition” and it is a component of allowable overhead that the government approves in calculating the price from corporations’ business proposals.

Of that component there are only 2 sub components… “bid and proposal” costs and “internal research and development” costs. You see… your reference to the engine of wealth creation is right on. And corporations as well as the government know that the new business that creates wealth depends on the research and development by the corporations.

The government is next to incompetent in performing the R&D itself. The people are capable enough but the processes create disfunction… as most federal government processes that are not authorized by the constitution do.

[Mountain_Soldier]

@Guilds

@Guvnah

Cut budgets elsewhere.

Where?

Military is the biggest cash cow. Of course, it is also pretty lucrative for the private sector for defense manufacturers…they will lobby like hell to make sure that does not happen.

We did spend $1.5 trillion on a plane that does not work.

CA is up to $100 billion on a train that doesn’t work.

[Tom_Ch]

@Mountain_Soldier

@Guilds

@Guvnah

Cut budgets elsewhere.

Where?

Military is the biggest cash cow. Of course, it is also pretty lucrative for the private sector for defense manufacturers…they will lobby like hell to make sure that does not happen.

We did spend $1.5 trillion on a plane that does not work.

CA is up to $100 billion on a train that doesn’t work.

Maybe CA can partner with Elon musk on this.

[Guilds]

@Smyrna

Ahhhhhhh…so there isn’t an actual comparison. Glad I could introduce you back to reality.

If you cannot connect the dots of how the billions of dollars of subsidies, to the oil industry, that subsidized the building of gas stations…there is no point to even try to have a discussion.

[Guilds]

@Mountain_Soldier

CA is up to $100 billion on a train that doesn’t work.

Yeah…we need to be able to build things more efficiently. Hell, even the French do it better than us.

[Samm]

@PurpnGold

@Samm

So what good is the high speed rail if you have to drive many miles to catch the train?

That’s 300 less miles you have to drive

So? If you drove to the airport and caught a plane, you would get there quicker, so what did the high speed train accomplish other than to cost billions of dollars to build?

[Samm]

@biggestal99

@Oldandtired

Jbiden has not wanted to work with the GOP on anything

Biden has not worked with the minority because they don’t negotiate in good faith.

Now there is the pot calling the kettle black.

[Samm]

@Guilds

We did spend $1.5 trillion on a plane that does not work.

No we didn’t.

[Samm]

@Tom_Ch

@Mountain_Soldier

@Guilds

@Guvnah

Cut budgets elsewhere.

Where?

Military is the biggest cash cow. Of course, it is also pretty lucrative for the private sector for defense manufacturers…they will lobby like hell to make sure that does not happen.

We did spend $1.5 trillion on a plane that does not work.

CA is up to $100 billion on a train that doesn’t work.

Maybe CA can partner with Elon musk on this.

Too late. He’s moving to Texas.

[Smyrna]

@Guilds

If you cannot connect the dots of how the billions of dollars of subsidies, to the oil industry, that subsidized the building of gas stations…there is no point to even try to have a discussion.

Always a conspiracy…always.

[TheRedComet]

Eh… lifetime cost of the F-35 is about 1.2-1.5 trillion dollars. And it doesn’t exactly meet the requirements initially specified in the JSF program contract. They lowered the top speed, g load, range, and payload requirements in around 2006 to match what the prototype planes were capable of at the time.

They had already spent a few billion extra dollars re-engineering the F-35 by that point to drop the weight of the B models that were nearly 2000 pounds overweight, which necessitated redesigns of the A and C models. Back then they were admirably trying to keep commonality between the three models. Since then they’ve really stopped trying and it’s somewhere around 40% commonality instead of the 85-90% originally specified. So giving up on performance and parts commonality was a cost cutting measure to avoid another expensive redesign.

In a way, he’s right and wrong. The F-35 works for the most part, and thanks to a ton of extra money poured into it, it works very well in simulated long range engagements with 4th generation aircraft like the F-15 and F-16. The F-35s dominated at Red Flag a few years ago, achieving very impressive kill ratios against F-15s driven by experienced pilots.

But it doesn’t meet the original JSF requirements. It doesn’t even come close to matching them. It was supposed to be a F-16, F-111, and F-22 rolled into one aircraft. Affordable and reliable like the F-16, the ground attack and network centric warfare capabilities of the Wild Weasel versions of the F-111s and EA-18 Growlers, and the stealth and BVR combat capabilities of the F-22. It can do most of those things well, but not to the levels originally demanded and the cost of the planes is magnitudes beyond what was originally promised.

In a sense, it’s a success and a failure. It works now. But the lifetime costs are far beyond any military program in history. The Air Force has sacrificed a lot of other needed programs to get the F-35 in service.

[TheRedComet]

Welfare state has to be cut too.

Both the military and the welfare state are budgetary disasters if we are only concerned about servicing the US debt.

But truth is… the Welfare state is a much more expensive program than the US military.

[Samm]

The F-35 is not a failure. It works just fine, but has a few operational bugs. Virtually every new military aircraft ever put into service has suffered from bugs … many far greater than anything the F-35 has suffered.

[WuWei]

@Jezcoe

@WuWei

@pam95650

There is absolutely nothing wrong with raising the corporate tax from 21% to 28%. Idiot boy trump lowered it from 38% and put us in a big-ass hole. I’m sure those 26 corporations who pay ZERO percent will suffer.

Do you pay corporate taxes?

I do.

My guess is you incorporated to avoid taxes.

[PurpnGold]

@Samm

So? If you drove to the airport and caught a plane, you would get there quicker, so what did the high speed train accomplish other than to cost billions of dollars to build?

Cheaper than a flight from LA to Vegas