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Space Travel For the 1%: Virgin Galactic's $250,000 Tickets Haunt New Mexico Town
The Real Dr John writes: The Guardian has an article about Virgin Galactic's proposed launch site, Spaceport America, which broke ground in southern New Mexico's high desert in 2009 with almost a quarter of a billion dollars from taxpayers, $76m of which came from the two local counties. Truth or Consequences, population 6,000 and home to the Spaceport America Visitor Center, is one of the poorest places in the state. The increased taxes, adopted across impoverished Sierra County, contributed to about $5m as of 2014. Since 2009, state school budgets have been cut and an estimated $26m in necessary repairs to the town's water system has been put on hold. There's no more money to pay for it. The average annual income of residents is just $15,000 per year, one third of residents live below the poverty line, and just 20% over the age of 25 have obtained a bachelor's degree.
Why build it in New Mexico?
There's a local expertise with spaceflight that goes back to 1947.
lucm, indeed.
Well I was intrigued by the $15,000 annual average salary figure for the year, because yes, that's a shit salary in the US, but we all know these things are relative.
From what I could find in terms of statistics in Mexico on this, $15,000 is almost double the average annual income for Mexico as a whole, so they surely aren't be that poor relative to the rest of their country.
Are they poor compared to countries with some of the highest personal average incomes in the world? Yeah, sure. But if this spaceport is even partly responsible for making this area twice as wealthy as the average across their country as a whole then I don't really see what the complaint is the much higher levels of income in this area compared to the rest of the country imply that something is definitely going better for them than elsewhere in Mexico.
" In ancient Athens the rich were socially compelled to spend their own fortunes on defending the state, performing rituals, and entertaining the poor. Imagine Soros and the Koch brothers and all the wealthy of either party building and equipping their own aircraft carriers at their own expense as a public benefit."
But the Koch brothers _do_ spend millions on entertaining the poor with funny actors, it's called the Republican Primaries.