Bingowings said:
Go build a public transport system then and plow some of the money recouped from taxation of the enormous workforce into rebuilding the dollar everyone seem to be distancing themselves from by dumping stocks at the moment.
I'm getting that you don't understand the current economic issues of the United States at all.
It might be practical at the moment to drive your car on an awesome highway but if the oil is in the hands of people who don't want to give it to you cheaply what do you do?
It is practical right now. And it will continue to be. Currently we can obtain oil from other countries cheaper than we can drill it ourselves. If that changes, then we'll start drilling. We have a virtually untouched supply of oil within our own borders that would allow our country to maintain self sufficiency for well beyond the point fossil fuels are expected to be needed. Meanwhile, advancements in alternative energies and electric motors continue to improve year by year. The reason why hybrids and electric cars are so unaffordable at the moment is because the relatively small number of them on the market right now are carrying the burden of billions of dollars in research and development. As they continue to become more popular, prices will drop and more affordable and competitively priced models will begin flooding the market.
Within the next fifteen to twenty years, America's interest in foreign oils will be a thing of the past. We may even find ourselves a major world supplier of the stuff, as oil in the Persian Gulf continues to dry up.
How far do you go for this practical awesomeness and how does the rest of the world look at you once you have gone there?
Personally, I feel like the United States really needs to draw out of the Middle East entirely. The benefits of America securing those regions and forcing stability spreads far wider than our shores, China is perhaps the nation benefiting the most from this, followed by the rest of East Asia. Screw the Straight of Hormuz, we don't need it.
If the rest of the world looks at us with disapproving eyes now, I can only imagine how much sharper those spiteful glares will turn if we are to wisen up and withdraw any and all American military presence out of the Middle East. It is costing us a lot of tax dollars, and it is benefiting us almost zilch.
Anyway, the idea of increasing public transportation in the U.S. is naive and silly. We don't need it. We wouldn't use it. It wouldn't work. Our cities have been built around the highway system. The decision was made long ago, and now we are locked in. Something like an interstate rail system linking major cities from one side of the country to the other would be pretty awesome! I'd use it. But it would be very expensive, it would take lifetimes to recover the costs if this was to be done by travel fare, otherwise it would be prohibitively expensive to those such a system would benefit the most. If you had that kind of money, you'd simply just fly or drive from NYC to LA and save yourself a lot of money and get there in a fraction of the time. The costs would probably fall to government subsidies, making the whole thing a huge tax burden. As far as being better for the environment, the construction of such a system would create an extremely sizable footprint. We're much better off waiting for our electric cars and maintaining the highway system we've already got.
The United States is a big place, and it is very spread out. You could fit the land mass of the entire U.K. into the U.S. thirty-seven times. You could take every populated portion of the U.K. (that is all cities, towns, and settlements), and squeeze them into the state of Oregon.
