That the Washington MLK memorial is, sadly, not remotely comparable to the Lincoln Memorial.
Although if you’re pegging your “mid-century” period as going through the end of the 70’s, then it very much was a Golden Age for minorities and women. Those groups were vastly better off politically and economically (both absolute and relative) at the end of the era than the beginning. While it’s true there’s not the same “things were better back then” nostalgia white males often get about the era, there’s plenty of nostalgia for the Civil Rights and Feminism movements of the 60’s as being eras when progress was being made very rapidly and the movements and communities had an optimism that (according to some) they don’t today.
According this chart US military spending as a percentage of GDP has been largely flat over the last 40 years and is considerably lower than it was in the 50’s. I’m just not buying the argument that the government is spending less now than in the 50’s in any meaningful way.
Have you got a chart for the relative growth in GDP?
Some insist on using stats from one particular source as though, even ignoring any context, one set of stats is the be-all and end-all.
I’ll illustrate the need to keep awake when considering stats with the following:
Please note that GDP in current dollars is about 18 times larger today than it was when Hoover Dam was built. To best compare apples with apples, these pricetags should best be measured as a share of the total U.S. economy. If you did this, the Hoover Dam would be one of the very most expensive projects on your list, though still smaller than the “Big Dig.” (How much of the Big Dig cost was land acquisition?)
The Hoover Dam’s nominal $49 billion cost was almost 0.1% of one year’s GDP in 1933, at the peak of its construction. The Big Dig was less than 0.2% of the 2005 GDP.
Welfare. Obamacare. Tons of other “entitlement” (a/k/a votebuying) programs.
And yes, the infrastructure is crumbling. Can’t buy votes by paving roads.
:rolleyes:
And that final price tag in Boston was wildly beyond all initial estimates.
I’m going to scrub your math a bit. The Hoover Dam was built over 6 years, during which the average GDP was $69.95B (1933 was an unusually low year for GDP). Hoover Dam cost was $49M (your typo had billion), which was 0.07% of that average GDP.
The GDP in 2016 was $17.35T (that’s trillion), so a project built in that time frame would have to cost about $12B to amount the same % of GDP as the Hoover Dam. The Manhattan Hudson Yard Development is well over that amount.
The Big Dig cost $14.7B, with construction between 1991-2007 (yikes!!), where the average GDP was $9.83T, so the BD was 0.15% of average GDP.
Change in GDP is just one of several ways to compare the value of dollars over time.
I used a bundle of consumer goods that include dams, monuments, and large suspension bridges:D
The point is, there are still a ton of large-scale projects being built.
I rather doubt the Hoover Dam and Gateway Arch estimates that you provided. Some of the others are private enterprises designed to make money, not inspire future generations. I stand by my point that the great structures and monuments are no longer being built- the Vietnam Wall and MLK memorials are orders of magnitude less in grandeur than the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument. Yeah, you can spend a lot of money on airports and rail expansions, but they aren’t for uplifting the human spirit.
Or Mount Rushmore?
But my primary point was that we paid our taxes and - as much as we griped - were proud to do so, because we knew we were investing in our society.
My first understanding of community came from my mother explaining the relationship between schools and roads, and taxes. When I was six. I got it, and I was in a “private” school.
Take it up with the Internet then. Any site I found estimated the Hoover Dam at between $600 and $800 million in current US dollars.
They no longer build Great Pyramids and Hanging Gardens of Babylon either. So what?
The Hoover Dam wasn’t built to “uplift the human spirit”. It was built to uplift the Colorado River to generate electricity.
What would you like to see a giant monument built to?
Imperial folly and a hugely dysfunctional relationship between the political class and the military-industrial complex.
You have 19 to choose from;
If you only measure him to his navel Shaquille O’Neill really isn’t that tall.
Government is taxing and spending more than ever has it is just spending it on different things. In the 1950s defense spending was about 65% of the federal budget, now it is 20%. Infrastructure spending in the 1950s was about 4% of the federal budget then, now it is about 3.5%.
The government now spends most of its money on transfer programs like Social Security, various forms of welfare, and healthcare.
So instead of roads and bridges, we get new hips for old people.
You mean like all those FHA mortgages that white families could get, but blacks couldn’t because their neighborhoods were red-lined?
Or the state universities that blacks weren’t allowed into, but instead could only attend a separate-and-unequal black college?
Or the same state universities that women weren’t allowed into, but had to go to a separate-and-unequal women’s college instead? Girls just a couple years ahead of me at my high school in Virginia had to settle for Mary Washington College, while the guys with the same credentials got into U.Va.
That’s just off the top of my head. There was lotsa shit from that era that benefited just white males; don’t know about the Christian part.
Though, wait a second, there were country clubs that my dad wouldn’t have been able to get admitted to because he was Jewish. (He didn’t want to join them anyway, but that sort of place is useful for making business connections and stuff, and Jews were excluded from many such places, even in post-WWII America.)
Public religious monuments.