Somebody stop them! They’ve already got an international high speed rail network! It can’t be done! Too much rail!
i am normal and can be trusted with large transportation budgets
NASA Annual Budget (2020): 22.6bil$ That’s 3 years of space budget. Crazy!
It’s even more dramatic when you consider how much lower labor costs are in Vietnam.
Of course spacex is separate.
Again, a sovereign currency issuer doesn’t need foreign or private financial capital. It can create it at will. It only needs the real people and resources needed to do the work that it wants to do. If it’s got the labor, knowhow and materials, it can just print the money and get that economic activity started. Especially if it doesn’t need to import anything.
Exactly, a good way to approach the problem is by asking what exactly is an economy. Fundamentally, it’s a system for ensuring that labor and resources are allocated to meet the needs of the people living in a particular society. Money is simply the mechanism that’s used to direct the allocation.
From this perspective, what a government does when it issues currency is stimulate activity in a particular sector of the economy where that currency is allocated. For example, Chinese government starting to do investments into chip development is resulting in that sector of the economy growing. Similarly, when private spending and markets allocate funds towards some area of the economy then supply grows to meet that demand.
That’s literally all this is, and obviously the government can issue as much currency as it wants, there’s no fundamental problem here because all it’s doing is directing the growth of the economy. Hence, as you point out, the issue isn’t with the money supply but how that money is used. The problem we have under capitalism is with labor and resource allocation being driven primarily by the interests of the capital owning class. Their goal is to direct labor to grow their capital, with any social benefits being strictly incidental. This breaks the connection between the government issuing currency and that currency being used to direct labor in a productive way.
I wish them luck. Hopefully they start building from Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City from the beginning so they have minimum operating segments that can open before the whole line is complete.
Wishing them luck, given the article has a few seemingly-relevant voices airing concerns about the funding. That said, if they do have to look for funding elsewhere, a useful infrastructure project and an economy that is pretty large and stable seems like the ideal circumstances
