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The $500 billion you're quoting for mass transit, would build high speed rail for California, Texas, and maybe a few states on the East Coast. That's it. Might cover 15% of the US population.

> Second US gets almost nothing per dollar from it's military spending due to inefficiencies

Most US military spending is on human soldiers, not on weapons programs. The waste you're referring to is a few tens of billions of dollars per year. It's not hundreds of billions. Your premise of somehow saving a lot of money by reducing waste, doesn't pan out under any scrutiny accordingly. Unless your plan is to slash hundreds of thousands of soldiers and their associated costs (even if we close half our foreign bases, which would save tens of billions of dollars, we would then need to significantly increase the spending on our domestic base capabilities to handle those soldiers; or we have to dramatically slash our soldier numbers).

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It's 500 billion per year, 5 trillion in a decade. Mass high speed rail in Texas is a stupid waste relative to places where lots of people actually live. North East cost has 17% of the US population on less than 2% of the US's total land. After you build high speed rail in that area extending it to that area city's will want to be on the network just as the US highway system was so popular. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis So extending to some of these other regions https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis#/media...

There's nowhere you're going to get $500 billion per year for anything. Entitlement costs are skyrocketing and are going to accelerate, we can't even afford how much SS / Medicare / Medicaid are going to cost in the next 20 years as is, much less find $500 billion in new spending. If the funding source is to be cutting the US military from $600x billion to $100x billion, that isn't even worthy of a serious discussion (if we slashed it in half to $300x billion - which might be the absolute minimum we need to maintain a standing capable army (it'd be about 1.5% of GDP equivalent a few years out) - that half might plug the entitlement hole in the coming decades, that's it).

If you build a house you take out a loan. The same is generally true of rail networks.

As I said in another comment we could slash Medicare spending by 40+% without reduicing care. But, as you did not bother to read my comment I can't help but think your being disingenuous.

PS: I don't run the country so any change I or you suggest has the same problem of never going to be implemented. Stopping rational discussion at that point kills all political discussions period.

> As I said in another comment we could slash Medicare spending by 40+% without reduicing care.

Concluding disingenuous is more than a stretch. I'm reading & responding to more than a dozen posts in this same thread.

Claiming we could reduce Medicare spending by 40% is a very, very dramatic claim. We could reduce general healthcare spending by a similar amount: the consequences of doing so are profound, involving vast job loss, pay cuts, and tax base loss. What's your near-term fix for that immense dislocation that would take decades to play out? Just tell the millions of people that will be negatively affected by it to suck it up and deal with it? Or do you plan to significantly boost welfare programs, unemployment benefits, retraining spending, etc. - and how do you plan to pay for that (cutting Medicare spending by 40% wouldn't even balance the budget deficit, which is set to balloon massively due to entitlement costs)?

Your government funded health care budget alone would be enough to pay for a free-at-the-point-of-use system for the entire population like the UK.

Yes, all the inefficiencies would have to go, and that would mean people would have to get jobs that are more efficient and produce more bang for buck. That's life.

Maybe if the entire population was like the UK this might work - Americans are rather less healthy in general - and one of the "inefficiencies" the UK system does away with is paying for treatments that offer particularly bad value for money, so you'd have to tell a bunch of cancer patients that tough, they're not getting chemo, now go and die quietly, and even then it's not clear whether UK levels of cost efficiency are even possible in the US.

NICE is no different to insurance companies when it comes to hiding the value of a given drug. For cancer patients not given chemo, you're thinking of the US when your credit card bounces and you get dragged out of hospital.

I'm not aware of any cases when people are denied chaemotheropy on the NHS, yet I am aware of people in the Us struggling to pay $50k a year for something as basic as insulin.

The disingenuous was in reference to the 500 billion, number provided. when you consider the leverage loans can provide it's closer to 500B per year.

>>Mass high speed rail in Texas is a stupid waste relative to places where lots of people actually live.

The Texas triangle (Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio) has a combined metropolitan population of 17 million.

Compare that to the 49+ million people in the northeast which would take about the same rail to cover and 17 million really is small. The problem is it's a triangle which means the maximum distance someone travels is minimized while still needing a lot of rail. You could make it a little shorter by making the trips take longer which kind of defeats the purpose. Further, there is not a lot to directly connect to it.

However, once the northeast networks expands eventually adding Texas would be reasonable, just not from day 1.

You can leave Austin and San Antonio out and still have 13 million people on the Dallas/Houston straight line.

And keep in mind that the terrain between Dallas and Houston is basically all flat and sparsely populated, so building rail there would be a lot cheaper than the northeast.

Rail only going to a fewe small city's would be underutilized. Ballpark 1/3 of the people going from A to B using high speed rail and you need a lot of people going from A to B. However, if B is on the way to C and people from A and B also go to C... etc you start to see massive network effects.

Sure, if Texas wants to spemd their money go for it, but this would be a relative ware of federal funds.

The Air Force and Navy definitely crank down their service numbers during "peace" time to invest in weapons systems instead. The lead time on ships & planes is so much longer than sailors & airmen through bootcamp that it makes sense. Plus they stick with a pretty low deployment cadence that could easily be cranked up if necessary.

The big problem is that whole categories of the military budget are waste. They are job programs in the shape of a weapon, but are overkill in our current asymmetric wars and likely useless against an equal adversary. The LCS & F-35 are trillions of dollars in waste.

Even when you are talking about a decent system, the internal level of waste is insane. I was an engineer for nuclear submarines. We were cited as an example for all other programs because we were on time and under budget. There was still a waste in every direction I could see.

I think things would get better with a switch to fixed priced contracts instead of cost plus. It requires the service to nail down their requirements up front, but at least you get the cost incentives right. Until then, the saying "first time half time, second time overtime" was pretty apt.

Two thirds of the country live between D.C. and New York and in California. Making high speed just in those places would do a massive amount of good for the country

I feel I should point out that if you decrease soldier numbers and take their salaries and invest it in infrastructure, that's quite a lot of open jobs doing work that is potentially doing more to strengthen the country.

I don't know how many troops one needs to defend the country and fulfill our obligations abroad (though I wish it were zero), but a military job lost surely pays for a civilian job building infrastructure. Especially considering overhead for the two relatively, the civilian job could certainly even pay better.

I'm sure there is a balance in there, but I don't think jobs would be one -- rather readiness requirements alone. And god knows I'm not qualified to guess as to that one, but it does seem likely we're going a bit overboard at present.

California is already 15% of the US pop.

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