Iznogoud

Forget it. I just dropped out of this forum. Believe it or not I was warned about not trimming my posts.. A forum that is that weak on bandwidth isn't worth attending.

That is a pointless statistic. The USA is larger than most of those nations so even if its rail system is obsolete by modern standards it is going to have high mileage. The only nations similar in area are Australia (with a very low population) and Brazil and China, both of which are developing nations. A more meaningful stat is the amount of high speed rail each nation has and the US does not show well there. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/highspeedrail.html?tid=grpromo

I think you are missing the point. One of the infrastructure problems listed was the lack of maintenance on bridges and highways. Apparently the level of spending is simply not enough to deal with all of the deterioration of the system. And transit in the US still lags behind of other industrialized nations, especially in high speed rail.

Ahh, but does it spend enough? The US can easily outspend nations like Italy or Germany which are only a fraction of its size and population but still be lacking in many areas. From your graph it appears that infrastructure spending in the US peaked about 50 years ago. Given the fact that this infrastructure is now very old and outmoded why aren't there higher levels of spending? Mind you I will concede that a good deal of modern infrastructure spending in the US seems to be coming from the private sector, especially in the realm of green tech.

The USSR was completely outgunned in the arms race. At one time it was spending over 20% of its GDP in an attempt to keep up with the US while the US never went higher than 6%. The nuclear arms race itself never did make much sense - it was purely a contest of terror. With tens of thousands of weapons on each side the overkill factor was ridiculous. By comparison Britain and France stopped at just a few hundred, believing that was a sufficient deterrent.

I think that rather than attempting to get NATO allies to increase their spending to US levels I would be more in favour of gradually decreasing it to the NATO average. A great deal of US spending goes into maintaining a global presence; something that none of its rivals even attempt and its military R&D alone is almost greater than the entire military budget of nations like Russia and China.

Even so, that 4% of GDP is almost 600 billion. A lot of bridges could be repaired with just half that money.

Yes, I have noticed that classical liberalism, which actually resembles modern conservatism, is often confused with modern liberalism, which leans toward democratic socialism.

It proves one of my my many points exactly, which thanks to overspending on defence and a lack of planning, the US is literally falling apart in many areas. Eventually something will have to be done about its decaying infrastructure, but having delayed so long in so many areas it is going to be much more expensive.

Yes, its focus was entirely on the US-USSR arms race, but it had an interesting twist at the end with China's first nuclear test. Of course the French continued testing right into the 90s, much to the disgust of the rest of the world.

Ever Watch "Trinity and Beyond?" It is an illuminating documentary on the nuclear arms race up to the 1960s. It is available on Youtube.

Interesting these problems have been discussed, but nothing has been done about them. Sort of proves a couple of my points doesn't it?

Typical stupid answer, but once again a complete failure to address the topic. But here, I'll give you a chance. Refute just one of these problems. https://www.businessinsider.com/asce-gives-us-infrastructure-a-d-2017-3#energy-d-5

Sorry, but you failed to address a single point with that post. That is like claiming the Dominican Republic is perfect because Haitians try to sneak into the country. https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/08/13/between-hope-hate-help-haitians-in-the-dominican-republic/

Thanks - I fit into both categories. Too bad you don't.