NASA executive quits weeks after appointment to lead 2024 moon landing plan

Re:NASA executive quits weeks after appointment to lead 2024... by maxxxxx on Friday May 24, 2019 @12:43PM (#20003266)

I accept that national defense is not a profit center, neither are highways. But they are good for everybody so it's ok that the taxpayer pays for them. The same may be true for TARP but I don't like to hear that TARP made profit because it didn't. Since 2008 we had huge deficits, banks got a backstop for free, the fed had to take on a lot of assets it normally should't have to, interest rates are very low. These all have a price.

TARP was not a benign thing but instead we should make sure this never happens again.

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Re:NASA executive quits weeks after appointment to lead 2024... by zaroth on Friday May 24, 2019 @02:56PM (#20004313)

Highways are absolutely a profit center. The Fed spends ~$50 billion/year on highways and gets ~20% of the entire productivity of the nation in return. ($4 trillion on $20 trillion GDP)

If the entire highway system increases GDP at least $250 billion (1.25% of GDP) then highways are profitable.

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Re:NASA executive quits weeks after appointment to lead 2024... by wallace_f on Friday May 24, 2019 @07:40PM (#20006197)

There do exist a lot of private roads. If govt did not build them for free, there would obviously be a lot more of them.

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Re:NASA executive quits weeks after appointment to lead 2024... by zaroth on Friday May 24, 2019 @07:58PM (#20006273)

But the government didn’t build them for free. We collectively paid to build them, and now they more than pay for themselves. Roads are arguably the greatest investment the American taxpayer has ever made.

Building pubic-use roads without government planning, permitting, and eminent domain is frankly not going to scale, aside from the nightmare of how all the different owners of these roads would go about rent-seeking.

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