Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (549826)	2/18/2010 12:35:06 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1573683

China puts a larger percentage of their resources towards defense. (Their official budget is a lower percentage of GDP than ours, but the government allocates more money to the effort outside the defense budget, and the military owns corporations and grabs some of the profits, and their draft is seizing additional resource to put to defense, without fully compensating for the use of those resources, and thus having the cost being fully counted by adding up monetary spending). More importantly we have far more non-defense resources left over than the Chinese do. The US certainly produces enough wealth that it doesn't devote to defense and security to build a bullet train. We don't because 1 - The effort would be a money loser, a net consumer of resources, not a creator of them. 2 - We spend so much money on social programs, and other non-defense government spending. 3 - Regulations, laws, lawsuits, and political pressure groups would add greatly to the time and cost to build such a project, as would compensating property owners that would have their property used or taken by the effort. The Chinese government is more capable of running roughshod over its people and businesses, and organizations, if it wants to. That's a bad thing for China not a good one, but it does make big projects easier if that's what your really looking for. Even with the ability to run roughshod over opposition, and with much cheaper labour, the project was very expensive for China. Even with the government heavily subsidizing the effort the fares for this train are equal to a couple of weeks wages for the average worker. en.wikipedia.org This is a heavily subsidized benefit to the relatively rich in China.