Re:As the U.S. fantasizes, the world builds high speed rail
by efuquen on Saturday July 01, 2017 @07:59PM
(#14679842)
When you're talking about something like fixing infrastructure the amounts are in the trillions of dollars but there is a realization that you are not going to come up with all the money in a single year. Coincidentally $165 billion a year would have more then made up for the infrastructure funding gap of $1.44 trillion over the next 9 years:
https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/wp-content/uploads/...
Even not looking at those numbers saying that amount 'wouldn't accomplish anything' is ridiculous. Hundreds of billions of dollars a year is a huge amount in any sector of the economy, even for the US. You can try and defend it as much as you want but that is a hyperbolic statement completely disconnected from reality.
We have immense problems everywhere from dams to grid to schools to bridges to healthcare (we could use to spend tens of billions in additional money just on the VA healthcare system), that are not present in that $90 billion and would not be dented by $165 billion per year.
We spent hundreds of billions on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and it barely made any difference.
The cost to redo a bridge in the US and then properly maintain it, is far beyond the cost to presently barely maintain it properly as we're doing.
That $90 billion you're quoting, is a vast under-outlay versus what we should be spending. Which is another way of saying, we need to be spending dramatically more just to break even on our current maintenance requirements. The US is facing trillions in spending just to replace our failing/failed infrastructure, and then all that newly replaced infrastructure needs to be maintained properly - so take that $90 billion and increase it upwards of 3x; 2x is what we should be spending now and are not; 3x is what we'll need to spend after we spend trillions on replacement to maintain the new infrastructure properly. That's just for our existing roads / highway infrastructure (which is merely one subset of our infrastructure spending needs).