On March 5 of this year Brandon Johnson, current Mayor of Chicago, issued a tweet bragging about how the city has invested $11 billion to build 10,000 new low-income housing units. It costs $1.1 million for the Chicago municipal government to build a single "cheap" apartment.
In 2015, California commenced phase one its high-speed rail project, with the aim of constructing 776 miles of rail infrastructure. Phase one, which only covers 171 miles and less than half of which has been completed a decade later, will have a projected total cost of $106 billion, which comes up to about $620 million per mile.
In 2023 the US spent $1.9 trillion between Medicare and Medicaid, or between $5K-6K per US citizen, which in the same year was above the OECD38 average for total healthcare expenditures per capita. As you can probably guess, this is less than half of the total of what each person spends on healthcare. And for all that, we were ranked 55th in life expectancy, behind Albania and Panama.
Speaking of OECD, in 2021 we came in 6th place when it came to education spending at the primary and secondary (K-12) level, and 1st place when it came to spending at the tertiary (college/university) level. And what bang do we get for our buck? We are currently ranked 19th (out of 41 countries) when it comes to student performance. Which is admittedly better than I expected going into this post, but still.
Last year childcare, which is literally just babysitting infants, toddlers, and young children, cost the typical household between $5,940 and $19,040 a year.
When a country threatens to pick a fight with the US, Americans often half-jokingly threaten back to "show them why we don't have free healthcare". War is the one thing we're good at, right? Well, at present Russia's factories are churning out 3x as many artillery shells as the US and Europe combined, and reportedly 10x as many tanks as us. China's shipbuilding capacity is over 230 times greater than that of the US.
In the field of drones the MQ-25 Stingray, whose only mission is aerial refueling, will have an estimated price tag of $136 million. Yes, to reiterate, we proved unable to build a drone that didn't cost more than the F-35. What was supposed to be the ultimate cost-saving technology didn't do that for us.
In short, the US can't build anything that doesn't face massive cost overruns and quality issues. But this isn't even the worst part: no matter what the measure, prices are steadily compounding year after year, growing faster than the rate of economic growth or wage increases.
And every word of this was true before Trump took office this second time. Many people allege he will break America. Assuming for the sake of argument that this is true, he will simply make the inevitable happen a few years or at best a few decades faster than would otherwise be the case. I don't mean to say that this is a trivial thing, but it's true nonetheless. Someone with a 3rd grader's understanding of math can see that the path we're on is mathematically unsustainable.
No one who's been president in the last 25 years has seemingly made even a dent in any of these problems. They sign a bill that throws more money at Problem A or Problem B, and in the long run that problem gets more expensive to treat. There's been a lot of talk, but when it came down to it no one has offered us a genuinely hopeful and optimistic vision for America's future.
Trump himself is inept, that should go without saying. But he has empowered technocrats who know how to run organizations efficiently. Even cabinet officials with no such experience, like Hegseth, and perhaps those with genuinely insane beliefs like RFK Jr., may be more inclined to give competent outsiders a seat at the decision-making table and break through intergenerational cycles of groupthink.
They might make everything worse. But for the first time since this crisis began, our chances of staving off civilizational collapse by the middle of the 21st century are greater than zero. By analogy, America is a patient with otherwise untreatable cancer and a firm offers them an experimental drug that'll either cure them or kill them faster. That's our current predicament.
