Skip to main content

Diigo Home

Matthew Yglesias » Reconstruction for the USA - The Diigo Meta page

yglesias.thinkprogress.org/...reconstruction-for-the-usa.php - Cached - Annotated View

Robert Maguire's personal annotations on this page

rmaguir
Rmaguir bookmarked on 2009-11-05 US politics defense spending statistics reference costs economy china
  • With that kind of money you could entirely build out a national network of true high-speed rail. One year’s worth of defense spending gets you that
  • Does anyone doubt that the net benefit of $100 billion spent on high-speed rail is easily higher than that for the last $100 billion spent on defense?
  • What was the cost, human and economic, of the I-35 bridge collapse? Of the Metro crash and resulting limitations on service? Of the Bay Bridge shutdown? And of course, investments in infrastructure constitute positive contributions to the economy, which ultimately strengthen our ability to direct resources toward defense.
  • defensespendingcontext
  • So the real point would be something like if we took 10 percent of the defense budget and re-allocated that to infrastructure, we could have a national HSR network in ten years. And we’d still be spending over triple what our nearest rival spends.
  • I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the quote, but someone told me he heard a Chinese official tell him “over the past decade you’ve spent $1 trillion on Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve spent $1 trillion building the future of China.” I don’t really think we should view that contrast in a paranoid light, but if you do want to take a paranoid view of the American national security situation it makes a lot more sense to worry about that than to worry that someone in a cave might build a bomb

This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 05 Nov 2009, by Robert Maguire.

  • 05 Nov 09
    rmaguir
    Robert Maguire

    US politics defense spending statistics reference costs economy china

    • With that kind of money you could entirely build out a national network of true high-speed rail. One year’s worth of defense spending gets you that
    • Does anyone doubt that the net benefit of $100 billion spent on high-speed rail is easily higher than that for the last $100 billion spent on defense?
    • 4 more annotations...