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Originally Posted by accord1999
It's one thing to lose your jobs by progress but in a lot of cases, it's jobs that are being moved to other countries with cheaper labor and weaker labor and environmental protection and standards, or to countries who protect them more with higher tariffs or currency manipulation.
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It's another thing to lose your job because declining taxation has made infrastructure spending prohibitively expensive, eliminating your role as labourer or specialized trade or civil professional.
The Budget Control Act of 2011 for example cost the country millions of jobs and not just in the defense sector but across other programs like medicaid as well.
The US is built as a corporate welfare state with massive, economy driving subsidies to various industries.
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America saw two great booms in infrastructure spending in the past century, the first during the Great Depression, when the Pulaski skyway was built, and the second in the 1950s and 60s, when most of the interstate highway system was. Since then, public infrastructure spending as a share of GDP has declined to about half the European level. America is one of the most car-dependent nations on earth, yet it spends about as large a share of GDP on roads as Sweden, where public transport is pretty good (see chart). The federal government scrimps on airports and sewage pipes so it can pay for pensions and health care.
Something similar is unfolding at the state and local level, where three quarters of all spending on infrastructure occurs. States cut their budgets by 3.8% in 2009 and 5.7% in 2010—and have not made up the lost ground. Meanwhile bills for repairs are coming due. Much of what was built after the war was only designed to last for 50 years and now needs replacing. That includes almost half the country’s bridges.
Signs of the shortfall are everywhere. Airports are funded by passenger fees and another trust fund. Neither has kept up with the increase in air traffic. The last big new airport was opened almost 20 years ago, in Denver. Everything about America’s major airports is too small, starting with the gates for parking planes. Last year Boeing began offering aircraft with folding wing-tips because so many are damaged while trying to squeeze in. At the busiest international airports, clearing customs can take hours. At New York’s JFK the average wait is about 30 minutes, but some poor souls wait four hours.
This is relatively efficient compared with what is going on in the sky. Most air- traffic control systems are less advanced than the technology found in smartphones. Alaska’s Juneau airport, which is smothered by low-lying cloud, is an exception. Its airport introduced GPS navigation after there were threats to move the state capital to Anchorage because it was so hard to land. The result has been 2,000 fewer flights cancelled each year. Other airports still treat planes as if they were galleons crossing an ocean, travelling between fixed points on a two-dimensional map.
With interest rates low and companies sitting on $2 trillion in cash, this should be a good time to bring in private money to make up for the lack of public investment. That cause has not been helped by some high-profile flops: the consortium that took over a stretch of road in 2006 that runs from Chicago to the Ohio turnpike and is operated by Ferrovial of Spain and Macquarie of Australia is near bankruptcy. The involvement of two foreign infrastructure finance companies is telling: because America has been slow to adopt public-private partnerships its companies have little experience of them. The Port of Miami tunnel, a billion-dollar project which is due to open shortly, was financed by Europeans and used a boring machine built in Germany and shipped across the Atlantic in pieces to dig the tunnel.
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From noted communist rag,
The Economist
The US economy lives and dies on public dollars.