Originally posted by: Mxylplyx
I think economics being the overriding concern above all else is what has made America so damn boring. How many of the man made wonders of the world were based on economics? Was the Roman Coliseum based on economics. I think sometimes we should just build something because it would be damn cool to build. The economics would come in to play around the projects "wow" factor.
Boring? This country spends a ridiculous amount of money on entertainment already. $100M movie budgets seem to be getting more and more common. Cable TV has gone digital and has hundreds of channels available. We've got amusement parks, theme parks, organized sports, video games, and who knows what else. What more do you need?
Put that $50 billion toward useful things, like maybe artificial intelligence (I'd love a house robot to do mundane tasks like laundry, vacuuming, shoveling snow, or even just cleaning dishes more efficiently than a dishwasher does), or more importantly, transportation infrastructure, energy distribution systems, and new sources of energy and means of transporting it (fusion reactors and hydrogen).
Better railway infrastructure could allow not only for more efficient transport of people (high speed rail or maglev), but also of cargo. Sending freight by train would also mean fewer trucks, and therefore less wear and tear on roadways, and less traffic. Some roadways nearby where I live needed to be widened almost purely due to trucks. One left turn lane at a major intersection would only allow a single truck through at a time, because they take so long to accelerate from a dead stop. With that turn lane, the road had three lanes. It's been widened to 4 (2 left turn lanes), and the entire intersection has been enlarged to give trucks an easier time. More railways would allow for more freight to be transported more quickly using less fuel, with less damage to roads, and less traffic.
Energy distribution should really be the responsibility of the power companies. The distribution network is largely antiquated and degrading, while power consumption continues to increase, and power company profits do the same. I guess the incentive there wouldn't be to give them money to get off their asses and upgrade the lines; maybe fines would be a better means to acheive this end.
Energy sources - fossil fuel stores won't last forever. Earth's size is finite. You're not going to get an infinite amount of fuel out of it. Simple as that. Oil is an unstable, dirty, and finite commodity. We need other sources of power.
Fusion research should be a high priority. We have immense amounts of "fuel" for reactors, courtesy of deuterium in the ocean. It's my opinion that fusion could solve a lot of problems, by providing a clean way of producing incredible amounts of energy from a small amount of a very plentiful resource.
With fusion power, it could then be possible to either produce large quantities of hydrogen for use in vehicles, or else couple it with as yet uninvented battery technology to power electric cars.
Besides, there's probably already a few billion dollars sapped out of the budget each year for little pork projects, very much the same as this "$50 billion grand infrastructure project" idea.
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