A national high speed rail system, eh? Why would we do that? Amtrak worked so well, did it? Time to expand?
Was Obama trying to be funny? Or stupid? While pundits focused on the dreary policy details in President Obama's State of the Union speech, we were left wondering who writes his material these days. The speech was full of â apparently â accidental humor. Either Obama recruited writers from "The Daily Show" or a thick cloud of unreality has descended on the White House. How else to explain lines like these in Tuesday's speech: "It is not a bigger government we need, but a smarter government." That's rich coming from the guy who jacked up spending to record levels. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the federal government is now on track to consume an average of 22.1% of GDP over the next decade. That's bigger than all but eight of the 60 post-World War II years before Obama took office. Going to preschool ends up "boosting graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy, even reducing violent crime" and can help infants eventually "form more stable families of their own." Preschool cuts crime and improves marriages? How was this miracle kept hidden all these years? Never mind that the two states Obama praised for their commitment to preschool â Georgia and Oklahoma â rank in the bottom third for reading and math proficiency, and college attendance, according to the Department of Education. Then there was this: "As long as countries like China keep going all in on clean energy, so must we." All in? Sixteen of the world's top 20 most polluted cities are in China. The New York Times reported just a couple weeks ago that Beijing's air quality ranked a "crazy bad" 755 on a scale of 0 to 500. The country has been building a new coal plant almost every week and plans 363 more, and China now emits almost twice as much CO2 as the U.S. "Already, the Affordable Care Act is helping to slow the growth of health care costs." This would be funny if it weren't so tragically wrong. After trending downward, insurance premiums spiked 9.5% the year after ObamaCare became law, and another 4.5% last year. And that's before the main event happens in 2014, when ObamaCare takes full effect. One study finds ObamaCare's mountain of rules and regulations will nearly triple premiums for young people. And his own health care experts say that national spending will shoot up 7.4% in 2014 and will climb 6% or more for the foreseeable future. "We can't cut our way to prosperity." That line had to elicit a chuckle out of Bill Clinton, at least. After all, the economy saw record growth in the 1990s even as real spending on domestic and defense programs was being cut four years in a row. The 1980s boom, too, happened while Reagan was cutting federal "investments." And the economy took flight in the 1950s after Congress slashed spending by a stunning 72% in the years following World War II. Obama's own record shows pretty clearly that the obverse â that we can spend our way to prosperity â is just as ridiculously false. Apparently, Obama believes all this nonsense. Which isn't funny at all. http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/021313-644354-accidental-humor-in-state-of-union.htm
Quote from piezoe: I'm a strong believer that borrowing for investment is the right thing to do. Therefore I would be happy with deficits that are due to investment such as, for example, borrowing to expand head start to all preschoolers, or to build a national high speed rail system. These investments will pay big "dividends." ------ Bull shit. Get the federal government out of all that stuff so America can succeed. States and free markets work better and cheaper at doing what makes America work.
It's important to recognize that Amtrak was flawed from the beginning because its many detractors and opponents were able to influence the legislation and structure of Amtrak to intentionally weaken it. It was set up so that the car attendants worked for Amtrak but the Conductors worked for the railroad company. Freight trains had priority over the rails! Retired Navy brass was appointed to head it up. If you were CEO of American Airlines at the time, you could not have hoped for a better deal than that! Try to think positively about what might be achievable rather than using the screw-ups of the past to reinforce your negative views of the future. High speed rail is the transportation of the future because it is more passenger friendly than air travel,less expensive and far more energy efficient. Get with the times!
It is likely that we would not have satellite communication and a host of other technological advances had we followed your advice. It would have taken much longer to develop the internet, we might not have it yet in fact, had the government not been involved. Radio was developed much faster because of government involvement. Trust me, you would not like what you wish for. America has succeeded very nicely because of good government. You would do better to work on fixing those areas of government that are broken and improving those areas that could do better, which is many of them. There is an optimum size for government. We in the U.S. are somewhere near optimum, probably too large rather than too small, but somewhere in the vicinity of optimum. There are some countries whose economies are not much bigger than that of our largest States. So in those cases the Country's government and the State's government are one and the same and some of them do very well. They have less poverty, higher educational achievement, better medical care and a cleaner environment than the U.S. has, but you wouldn't want to live in any of them because they are all more socialist than the U.S. So, sadly it appears you are stuck in the world's most capitalist nation and not liking it very much. It seems you are pretty much out of luck.