this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
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Looks like nothing but good news here. Giving the FAA sufficient funding to actually do its job seems like a good step forward.
100 Billion dollars?! Isn't this just tax payers money that could be used on health care keeping our broken aviation industry running? I wonder what a 100B train project would look like...
$100B spread over 5 years wouldn't make much of a dent in health care. We spend over $4T per year on health care.
I agree that the airline industry has significant problems to be solved but I'd hardly call it broken. Annual US spending on airfare is a little less than $350B. There are nearly no accidents. Approximately 45% of Americans fly commercially in a given year.
As to high speed rail, I would love to see it and I'm sure it can be done more efficiently than it has been in CA. That said, the California high speed rail project has, so far, cost about $128B. It has been in the works for 15 years. About 120 miles of the originally planned 500 miles of track have been laid.
So, I don't think that your criticism is valid. There may be valid criticisms of the legislation but saying that the airline industry is "broken" and this should be spent on health care (with no identified plan for how to spend it) or on high speed rail is a lazy argument that seems like it is being made for the sake of arguing.
Very good reply. But 350B in ticket sales and they still need 100B in public funds?! That's my definition of broken! An industry that relies on taxpayer money to be safe instead of being able to inherently do it is broken to me. Imagine the car industry needing 25%of its net sales in public funding just to keep the wheels on safely....
350B in ticket sales per year. 100B over five years (20B per year) in public funds. That's 5.7% (not 25%) to regulate the industry, upgrade existing systems and equipment, hire and train a large number of new air traffic controllers, and increase customer rights. Some of that is to catch up on stuff that we should have been funding all along but haven't like hiring and training air traffic controllers.
IMO, this is a good thing and a worth-while expenditure.