4 ms·

VAT hurts the poor and the middle class. Seems like a bad move when we have billionaires playing around with rockets in space.

• WalterBright 5y ago
  Rich people playing with airplanes is how we wound up with cheap global air travel.
  • csb6 5y ago
    That is misleading and misses most of the story. A large reason we have cheap global air travel is due to government intervention, research, and military development since the first World War. The U.S. (and other) governments have massively subsidized the development of the aerospace industry for decades and built/funded key infrastructure such as airports. "Rich guys playing with airplanes" is not how the complex system of air travel was created. Hell, the guys who invented airplanes weren't even rich.
    • WalterBright 5y ago
      > Hell, the guys who invented airplanes weren't even rich. Sure, the Wrights were not rich. But Bill Boeing was. And Howard Hughes. Donald Douglas got financing to start Douglas. Allan Lockheed pretty much started from scratch. McDonnell developed its passenger jets from scratch. Airliner travel was a paying concerned because of rich passengers. Flying for ordinary people did not come about until the 1960s. BTW, jet engines were conceived and developed by private industry, because the government saw no value in them. Until the government saw flying jet aircraft. P.S. The government airplane project, the Langley Aerodrome, cost something like twenty times what the Wright Flyer did, and simply fell into the Potomac like a sack of wet cement.