Biden is calling for a two trillion dollars investment in infrastructure. The GOP is calling this unnecessary expensive. Of course, they are not complaining about the expensive tax cuts. I found out recently that the cost of the new F35 fighter jets, including their lifetime operating cost is about two trillion dollars. I think THAT is unnecessary expensive. Our older fighter jets are still the best in the world. The jets, while giving us superiority in the sky, will not be effective in the wars we are fighting today. We bombed the hell out of Vietnam and the Middle East and what have we got for it? Lots of death and destruction without achieving our goals. More jets will not make us more competitive in the world economy either. Infrastructure upgrade is what we need the most to be competitive.
While China is building bullet trains and railroads to accommodate them, we can't build a single one here connecting SF and LA. While China is building bridges and highways, our roads and bridges are falling apart. China is building new airports and LaGuardia and LAX are shameful examples we have. So yes, I agree with Biden that we need to improve our infrastructure now as fast as we can.
The GOP does have a point in that we have not been transparent about the cost and timing of our projects in the past. That is on both GOP and Democrat administrations. It cost billions to add couple of miles on an existing subway and to add three stops in New York and took many years. Why is it so expensive and take so long? GOP also want to have bipartisan participation in deciding what to build. Projects should not be doled out as pork to influential Congressmen or Senators. Of course, when the GOP want to have bipartisan involvement in deciding the projects, it is another way of them saying: we want some of the pork too!
Well, it's obvious that we don't spend enough (or maybe don't spend wisely) on infrastructure. I haven't read the whole plan and don't plan to. It seems like a pretty bold plan and nothing we should be surprised by, considering he ran on most of these ideas.
ReplyDeleteI think it's funny that there are some, like McConnell that are balking at the amount, but he had no hesitation with the tax cuts. And let's be honest, the tax cuts for the wealthy only made the wealthy more rich. I don't necessarily agree that they helped the economy at all. The big corporations still laid off people while they made a ton of money.
I will have to see what the cost factors and what positive outcomes come with building high speed rail. While I think it would be great to be able to upgrade public transportation, I just don't know if American society will ever back mass spending on it.
I think another area we will disagree is that I think we constantly have to upgrade our military equipment. Can we justify building in the F35s? I don't know. But we can't have aging planes either. You are correct that the wars we might fight now and in the future are non-traditional, but I worry that we still might need these planes.
But that's what infrastructure is, right? We need to build it all up to safeguard the future. As with any budget, we have to figure out what's a priority and what will be needed later on. I don't know if we can keep printing money and becoming more in debt.
-LBOAYM
I do agree that we have to be number one in military power. Right now we spend more money than the next 10 nations' military budget combined. We do not need that much spending to be number one. The F-35 is an example of overspending as a result of lobbying by the military industrial complex. The lobbies claim that we need the F-35 because of threats from China and Russia. Let's say that we are in war with China or Russia and we don't use nukes because if either side is stupid enough to use nukes, we are all dead and nothing else matters.
ReplyDeleteLet say for the sake of argument that air power is the decisive factor between the U.S. and Russia or China and that none of our allies are allowed to help us. Our current fighters are ahead of both of these countries. Not only that, since fighter jets have limited distance range, it is not just about the jets in an air war. We have way more bases all over the world to fly jets and bomber out of. We also have 11 aircraft carriers where jets can take off and land. This is half of the aircraft carriers in the world. Russia has one and China has two. So we can take off with the jets from many more places than Russia and China. So my point is that fighter jets are not crucial to upgrade among all possible weapons. But fighter jets and other planes are lucrative for the military industrial complex and thus the lobbying effort in D.C. is furious and thus it drains the money that we can use in things like intelligence, AI, robots, cyber attacks and defenses etc. Things that I believe China is concentrated on.
I don't think that China is a threat to the U.S. military. But their national strategy is more of soft power. I don't know if their Belt and Road Initiative is going to be successful. But their budget for that is about 2 trillion over 10 years. That is about the budget for the F-35. I believe that even if BRI is not as successful as China wishes, it will still bring more goodwill to China than the F-35 is going to bring the U.S., especially if the F-35 is bought and used by Saudi Arabia in places like Yemen. I envision that someday the nerdy computer geek is going to be more important to national security than the manly fighter pilot. Maybe that day is here already!