Quote:
Originally Posted by Carth
Just imagine if all the HS2 money & materials spent to shave 5 minutes off a train journey was instead ploughed into social housing, NHS, dentists (lol) . . in fact anything that would help (rather than decimate) communities
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This is silly, though. Investment in infrastructure can help further growth, which in turn would help pay for more day-to-day spending. Housing would also be a good target for such spending. There is a difference between one-off large expenditures in things like HS2 and the yearly spending commitment you make when putting more money into the NHS.
Also, HS2 was about increasing capacity as well as speed. Taking pressure off regional services by having an additional direct intercity train line. It would have made journeys between cities shorter and increased local services and train capacity.
We should have funded such things when interest rates were at rock bottom. More jobs, more spending in the economy and eventually more modern infrastructure. Instead, we just cut everything and wonder why the country is slowly dying. We don't want infrastructure built, we want to make it more difficult to trade with other nations, we want to make it more difficult for even very qualified people to move here and work, and we also don't want to make it easy to start new businesses.