Somehow this stuff got built before. There must be a way to get back into that state.
It'll likely be the same for high-speed rail, hyperloops, and under-city tunnels. Once we're at war again there will be a huge incentive to be able to move large quantities of people across the country within hours, and ideally do so out of the reach of aerial bombardment.
It would be nice if we could do this without blowing everything up, though.
Please don't make the mistake of equating the hyperloop scheme with reputable and tried-and-true railway services. Hyperloop is at best a marketing gimmick based on naive and ill-informed notions of what it takes to run a vehicle in a track, while real railway services are mundane technologies which have been proven to work for at least half a century.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Gould
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Transcontinental_Railroa...
Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is not wisdom. A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past; he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future. The future can be better than the past. According to the data it has been [1][2][3]. So optimism isn't a fluffy ideal to scoff at.
Newton's laws make it clear that approaching vacuum allows for greater speeds. An object in motion will remain in motion unless an outside force acts upon it [4]. Therefore, the greater part of truth is out of reach of cynicism.
What is more likely, that a man who heads a company that works in the space sector would think that moving through a near-vacuum was honestly more efficient [5]? Or that he would propose it merely as a marketing gimmick? And why can't it be both?
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCm9Ng0bbEQ
[2]: https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_and_ola_rosling_how_not_to_be...
[3]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/04/bill-gates-the-world-would-b...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_laws_of_motion
[5]: https://themysteriousworld.com/top-10-fastest-man-made-objec...
The reason your infrastructure sucks is because your nation would rather spend money on war than anything else.
I think that the securitization and sell off of these mortgage backed securities were the banks trying to pass the hot potato off onto somebody else. They knew it would blow up, only the financially illiterate, and busybody do-gooders in government with a regulatory gun to the banks heads didn't see it coming with predictable results.
"No executive of a major mortgage company said at the time that the government was forcing them to make subprime loans. They said they did it because they thought they would make money. And even now, after the crash of the housing market, with all the temptation to point fingers, it is awfully hard to find a mortgage executive who echoes the argument"
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/us/politics/the-role-of-r...
Before the crisis, people figured out that if you bundled a lot of them together and sliced up the bundle in clever ways, you could shuffle the risk around and manage it better. People who wanted riskier assets could get them, and people who wanted safer assets with lower returns could get them too.
Except this only works if you actually evaluate the risk correctly. If you underestimate the potential for large-scale default due to, say, a sudden drop in house prices, then everything gets screwed up, and people who bought “safe” assets suddenly find themselves losing their investment.
Anyone pushing that narrative is trying to pushing a implicitly racist 'reason' for the financial crisis: "it was all them loans to the black people that did it" .
It was demand for mortgage-backed securities (viewed as traditionally safe assets for investment) from investment funds that led to more and more lenient mortgage qualifications to increase supply, weakening the previous strength of those securities overall that, through layers of financial indirection (see tranches), were not valued correctly until too late (with the subsequent credit default swap responsibilities crippling interbank loaning).
This was targeted predatory lending, often targeted at people who already had home equity in some form. This was not something significantly exacerbated by the FHA.
I agree it’s not the whole story, but it’s something.
The bulk of the interstate highway system was built between 1960 and 1980.
The percentage of GDP collected as income taxes is about the same then as it is now. In fact, the top 1% paid less of the total taxes during the New Deal than now.[1]
[1]http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2017/08/07/the_history_o...
- During WWI it peaked at 77% - During WWII it peaked at 94%!!
Capital gains -- the rate the upper class actually pays -- has never risen above 35% at the federal level. And that's within a few points of 2018 marginal rates when we factor in state level taxes for places like California. The tax moved from federal to state (or to earmarked federal, like NIIT)
Capital gains:
1945: 35% federal + 6% state = 41%
2018: 25% federal + 3.8% NIIT + 13.1% state = 41.9%
Prior to losing SALT, wealthy Californians paid slightly lower marginal rates than in 1945. Trump's changes cause the current marginal tax rate for wealthy Californians to be higher than in 1945 -- the year you're calling out as a peak.
No one really paid 94%.
https://toomuchonline.org/the-tax-that-turned-ronald-reagan-...
...a rate which almost nobody actually paid, given the copious methods for reducing tax liability available at the time (most of which have since been eliminated).
To be clear; I’m not blaming the actual victims of bigots and intolerants, nor do I want to remove any blame from the bigots and intolerants. I simply want to add some blame to those blindly pushing diversity without regard to who gets hurt.
Generations of abused minorities and women might beg to differ, from slavery to lynchings to internment camps to mass oppression, abused people from Germany (yes, you read that correctly), Italy, Ireland, China, Japan ... people who were Jewish, Catholic, Latino, African-American (of course), etc etc. etc. would all say otherwise. Assuming you are talking about the U.S., until 1920, women couldn't even vote. Until the approximately the generation who came of age in the 1980s, they didn't have access to most of the labor market - unless their husband gave permission (maybe that ended around the 1950s and 1960s) - and in most fields they still are excluded from the top positions and in many fields are still excluded from most positions except HR, receptionist, and organizing the office party.
EDIT: Some updates