Cost of life in USA has gone up significantly since then and hence people are willing to put up with unreasonable and super expensive safety mechanisms which bl

Cost of life in USA has gone up significantly since then and hence people are willing to put up with unreasonable and super expensive safety mechanisms which bloat the entire project. USA could however use immigrants in such projects with lower safety standards, something that most middle easterns countries and our very close allies like Saudi Arabia has been doing. Take above paragraph with a pinch of salt please. Seriously speaking, large government projects are less about people and more about misplaced priorities of politicians. California's rail project was absolutely nonsensical and horribly bloated. Why do we even need a high speed train between Merced and Bakersfield ? For cows ? American private entrepreneurs are dreaming big. Those big dreams however are getting realized only in areas government has not yet killed off with ultra crazy regulations. Elon Musk alone is doing it with Giga Factory, SpaceX and Teslas. Amazon through entering healthcare. Google is doing it through Google brain and so on. There might not be huge structures built with human sacrifice but the efforts gone into them are nevertheless equally spectacular. America is building far bigger thing that benefits even the poor person in remote village of India instead of dams and trains. You just need to look at right locations. Also America doing it without risking lives of workers.