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- The Case of Murawiec and Marc Rich -
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We have a breakdown, a physical breakdown, in the U.S. economy, in transportation alone. We're insane on air travel! We depend upon air travel for relatively short hauls. We can build magnetic levitation rail systems, which have speeds of up to 250 miles an hour, or higher. We can build, on the East Coast, for example, from Bangor, Maine or Boston, all the way down the traditional line, down through Washington, Richmond and so forth. Why do we need air travel, when we can travel more efficiently from city center to city center, by train--by maglev--than we can by air? Why do we put all this load on short-haul traffic, in high-density population areas, on air travel, when we should have high-speed rail-equivalent transportation? We can have it. That's one of our needs.
We also have a breakdown in our health-care system. Here, the thing is very simple: Simply take the HMO law, and destroy it. pplause] Return to Hill-Burton! It worked. And, with the objectives of Hill-Burton. The point is, to provide for the citizens, in every county of the United States, an objective of approved health care, guaranteed to the citizens, by cooperation among public, private, and semi-private facilities--like voluntary hospitals--a pool of capability, which ensures that anybody who falls in the street, in that particular area, is going to be cared for. And, we'll worry about the money afterward. It worked! It was cheaper, than what we have now! Relatively speaking; go back to it.
We have to have a new approach to urban renewal. We have this area out here: It's going to collapse. An area of bubble, created by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and poor Sir Alan Greenspan. They've created a financial bubble, it's about to collapse. Look along this corridor, the Dulles Corridor, from Washington to Dulles Airport. Look at the empty things--this is lost jobs; these are lost incomes, of people who are liable for mortgages in these areas. What are you going to do? You have created, with this real estate bubble, this crazy suburbanization, you've created insanity in the economy. The idea of the old city was better. What's the advantage of suburbanization, if you're doing so much time commuting, that you have no time for your children?
The idea of the urban center, was to have an efficient relationship, of habitation, public services, and places of employment. We have to go back to that orientation. We need an urban renewal program, for dilapidated parts of the country, which enable us to do that, to restore this. pplause]
We need national mission-orientation projects. For example, let's take the space program: The United States made money on the space program. We made money in space! Not bad, huh? Better than over real estate! How'd we make it? What we did is, we generated, especially when Kennedy moved the thing ahead, with the pre-existing space program, and giving it a mission- orientation: We got to the Moon! We put a man on the Moon! The benefit, of what we spent to do that, was several times the cost of doing it, in terms of the spill-over of technologies, which improved the economy. So, we need technology-driver programs, not merely as prestige programs--they're not prestige programs. When we force science, investment in science, and the development of science for investment, we create the technologies, which we then, in turn, apply to other aspects of the economy, which increases our productivity and our wealth.
Therefore, the United States must have a series of mission- orientation programs. I proposed, when I proposed what Reagan named the SDI, that be the purpose of the SDI. That we try to get the Soviets to agree to this program, which would take the threat of the missile crisis, away from us, simply agreeing to cooperate on it. And then, use the technologies which we would develop with that program, to benefit all of humanity. Ed Teller, who happened to agree with me at that point, said, in late October of 1982, {"for the benefit of the common aims of mankind."} And for the common aims of humanity in the United States, mission-orientation is necessary.
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