pansophist:


1. False equivalence. The point is that America is rich and should afford a beautiful train station and network compared to Russia in which in your own words, California's economy is x3 bigger.

It's like going to the house of a Uber driver and seeing that he lives better than Dangote. How can you justify that? Are you normal?

2. Black and white comparison. Economics is not calculated like that. Even though Americans earn more, Americans also spend more. Don't forget it's the same US where over half of their population can't fork out 500 USD in an emergency.

A country where healthcare and university education is not free and a major cause of bankruptcy. A country where its citizens have a lower quality of life compared to other countries that earn low.

3. About California's economy is bigger than Russia x3, this is a very daft way to look at economics. Russia has things you can't quantify with money. They have lands, natural resources, oils, minerals, commodities, major food exporters, etc. I repeat this is not black and white.

For example, lots of illiterate village men are far wealthier than those suit-wearing bankers. These villagers have lands, farms, thousands of cows, etc. It's real-life assets that give money meaning. USD is just computer-generated wealth, that paper is not wealth in itself.

For example, Somali-shillings is a currency in Somali land. But since Somaliland is an unrecognized state, its currency is not valid outside Somaliland. But if you take cows, gold, diamond, silver, kidney, beans, or any real-life value from Somaliland to maybe Kenya, then it becomes valuable.

So to judge the largest country in the world as x3 poorer than California is just wrong. California's wealth is mostly computer-generated USD, it's not oil, gold, minerals, rare earth materials, etc. This is also why the US pegged the USD to Saudi oil, known as the petrodollar.

If Russia is also very poor, why does the US want to destroy it? Why not just ignore Russia? Russia is far more wealthy in real-life wealth than the US. In another post, I will break down the US economy. It's a myth. It's not number one.

How they arrived at such calculation I have studied for years, and as far as I am concerned, China for example has more real wealth than the G7 combined.

precisely