Obama Wants to Spend 50 Billion to Rebuilt Infrastructure

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/us/pol....html?_r=2

When I saw this, I thought "FINALLY". Anyone who's taken US History should remember what FDR did to get out of the Great Depression. Why it took this long I'll never know.

I'm unsure of what this guy means.

Representative Eric Cantor, the House Republican whip, called it “yet another government stimulus effort, another play called from the same failed Keynesian playbook.”

Then I saw this and figured he's just butthurt.

ess to find ways to pay for the plan so that it would not add to the nation’s rising deficit. The White House is proposing to cut tax breaks and existing subsidies for oil and gas exploration and production as one way to pay for the plan, but officials said Mr. Obama is open to other ideas. Historically, transportation projects have been paid for largely with dedicated taxes like those on gasoline.

a public works project right?
good and bad.

Keynesian economic theory harkens back to the days of the Great Depression and Roosevelt's New Deal. Since Hoover's "Trickle Down" policy did not work, Roosevelt's idea was to make the economy flush with cash from the ground up. Keynesian economic policy dictates the same idea - when there's a depression, flood the market with money to increase money supply and wealth. This was especially true of this recession due to extremely tight creditors that didn't want to lend for fear of foreclosures, defaults, and bankruptcies. Keynesian theory was the reason behind the $787 billion dollar reinvestment and all the bank bailouts. That's how it works.

In the end, the New Deal made a significant dent, but it was only World War II that pulled us out of the Great Depression. This sent off over 500,000 men overseas and America needed every production facility online to fight the war. So, no one, to this day, knows if Keynesian economic policy truly works during a time of depression.

Interesting. Bring the soldiers back then work to invest in creating tons of new jobs.

It'll work fairly the same. You have to remember we were invested in a war.

If you'll remember from US History, FDR also got us tremendous debt.

If you'll remember from US History, FDR also got us tremendous debt.

All of the current dept is from post 1960s. All of FDR's dept has been paid off.

All of the current dept is from post 1960s. All of FDR's dept has been paid off.

Doesn't mean we aren't one of the most in-depth countries in the world.

Doesn't mean we aren't one of the most in-depth countries in the world.

50% of GDP ain't bad.

Pumping cash into the market also increase US competitiveness against rival exporters and lower the value of US dollar held by other countries, reducing overall trade deficit ex post facto. Still it looks like America needs another boom or war to get out of recession. Because Japan never did adface:

50% of GDP ain't bad.

Pumping cash into the market also increase US competitiveness against rival exporters and lower the value of US dollar held by other countries, reducing overall trade deficit ex post facto. Still it looks like America needs another boom or war to get out of recession. Because Japan never did adface:

i just wish we'd start finding ways to live off of earth. i'd love to see a mining facility on the moon, and development on a lunar base for future space exploration.

50% of GDP ain't bad.

Pumping cash into the market also increase US competitiveness against rival exporters and lower the value of US dollar held by other countries, reducing overall trade deficit ex post facto. Still it looks like America needs another boom or war to get out of recession. Because Japan never did adface:

I wish it was only 50% of our GDP. LOL.

i just wish we'd start finding ways to live off of earth

International Space Station?

i'd love to see a mining facility on the moon

, and development on a lunar base for future space exploration.

Distance to Moon: 238,857 miles
Distance to the nearest planet (Mars): tens of millions of miles

It's around 90%, according to the US Dept Clock.

That's kind of scary, actually.

International Space Station?

Hardly counts. That's not a sustainable way for more than a small number of highly trained individuals to live off of Earth.



Fractions mean little without a volume to go off of. All of those minerals have use though. Not sure how much of it is extractable.

Distance to Moon: 238,857 miles
Distance to the nearest planet (Mars): tens of millions of miles

Surface Pressure on Earth: 101.325 kPa (MSL)
Surface Pressure on the Moon: 10^−7 Pa (day), 10^−10 Pa (night)

It's around 90%, according to the US Dept Clock.

That's kind of scary, actually.

It depends on what you include. Iraq War expenses haven't fully been recognized (VA benefits, cost of refurbishing the military, etc.). Medicare and Medicaid obligations aren't included. Social Security will be upside-down within this decade. If you include EVERYTHING the US debt exceeds 400% of GDP, but most of those liabilities are just liabilities and not actual spending so we'll never know.

One slightly on/off topic quip about space exploration and colonization: as much as I'd like to see major groundbreaking advances in this field, people need to take a step back before instantly prescribing interplanetary immigration as a cure for global overpopulation. We shouldn't have to look to the stars for the continued survival of our species; in fact, it's completely asinine when you consider we're a biological species like every other on Earth, yet we're the only ones who can't live in balance with everything. Packing up and leaving a planet to die, only to go colonize and eventually kill another, is not how anything should live.

Packing up and leaving a planet to die, only to go colonize and eventually kill another, is not how anything should live.

Leaving? I think most people who say colonization is the way to go don't have abandonment of our home planet in mind. o.o It's all in the name of expansion.

I agree that we shouldn't HAVE to look to the stars, but even the earth doesn't have enough resources or space to accomodate the massively growing number of our species. I mean, think of what will happen when india and china become close to industrialized as the US is.

As an electrical engineer graduating in 2012, I fully support heaping boatloads of infrastructure improvements. Not only because our infrastructure is quite literally crumbling around us (the massive east coast blackout a few years back, that bridge collapse, probably dozens of miles of road around you, etc), I want to be in high demand for the first many years of my career. >_>

My point was not to discourage expansion, but to keep others from ignoring finding a solution to the problems we have as opposed to a quick fix that only indirectly patches the issue.

In other words, there are ways to lower the Earth's population to sustainable levels that don't involve genocide/killing of people in general. Lord if I could list some right now, but the fact that no one seems to want to give it a moment's thought is what scares me. Find a natural, healthy way to keep a global population at a sustainable level before going to colonize other worlds.

It currently costs over a million dollars to put a single person in space.

Spending 15 grand a year to put them on welfare doesn't look so bad when you think of it that way...

There aren't really any overpopulation problems, just distribution problems. We have way too much food in some spots, and not enough in others. 7 billion people cannot live like Americans - but that's because the average American is so inefficient.

Of course it costs over a million dollars to put one person in to space. But doesn't the marginal cost decrease past one person?