Fast Train Coming?
In search of a metaphor for the gulf that separates the nation’s political parties? Look no further than the high-speed locomotive. Adored by many Democrats, who wax poetic about a speed and efficiency of communal travel, trains have become a favorite target of conservative Republicans, who fret about their cost. In the last six months, Ohio, Florida and Wisconsin have turned down federal money for rail construction because, they argue, they cannot afford their share of the bill.
Ignore for a moment the political calculus that may be at work in these state capitals. (High-speed rail is a signature project of the Obama administration, which has pledged $53 billion to improve the nation’s trains.) The idea that train travel is just not an investment worth making should give every citizen pause. In the short term, rail improvements provide jobs, a prospect that any governor should welcome. And in the long term, it is a good bet that such investments will turn a profit. Dwight Eisenhower’s interstate highway system has proven to be a real moneymaker. Imagine if local governments had turned down funding because they did not want pay for the entrance ramps.
In a country as large as the United States, wedded as it is to the automobile, trains will never be as popular or prevalent as they are in Europe. Yet President Obama’s plan is not overly ambitious; it seeks to improve regional transportation and existing rail corridors. Few investments could do more to boost the country’s recovery and wean it from dependence on oil. One need not be a railroad buff to see that.
Congress Kills the Dialogue
Of all the proposed budget cuts, the most shortsighted is the determination to shut down the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which helps support NPR and PBS). The House voted in February to cut all funding. Not one Republican objected.
Perhaps it is a kabuki drama, playacting to threaten a news source like PBS—which bends over backward to be impartial and whose corporate president is a Republican, Patricia S. Harrison—into becoming even more conservative or silent. But a defunded version of PBS and NPR would be more dependent on corporate sponsorship and less free to speak truth to power. Culture would also be dumbed down and democracy’s dialogue reduced to a stammer.
The news media are already gasping for breath. News outlets have laid off reporters, cut investigative staffs and dropped book and classical music reviewers. Meanwhile the public stations have been the closest thing we have to a national university, where high culture is available free to low income people who might otherwise never hear an opera.
Some congressmen want the media to be weak and want to leave the news delivery and classical music to the free market system. So it’s back to the wasteland of laugh-track sitcoms, celebrity gossip and the ravings of Charlie Sheen as the volume surges for commercials and drug ads. And goodbye Beethoven, “American Experience,” the “News Hour,” “The Civil War,” “Frontline,” “Car Talk,” “Prairie Home Companion,” “Charlie Rose” and Sherlock Holmes. The United States, says Congress, just cannot afford you.
Tax-Dodge City
Welcome to Tax-Dodge City, a 100-year-old municipality where business booms. Today 1,800 businesses enjoy its lax regulation, low taxes and cheap utilities. The city council also has made elections hassle-free. Not one election was contested between 1984 and 2006, and now the council conveniently appoints its members. Who would vote, anyway? The population of the city is 95.
Yet Tax-Dodge owns the power and light, fire, police and health departments and every house, all 30 of them, which are rented to city workers and relatives of city officials. In Tax-Dodge, municipal salaries are high. In 2008 the city reportedly paid $1.65 million to a man who served as both city administrator and deputy city attorney; he still works as a consultant. The $500,000 annual pension of a retired city administrator is the state’s highest.
What is the city’s secret? Virtually all 50,000 local workers commute to Tax-Dodge from real towns where elected governments spend tax revenue on schools, parks and social services for their residents. In Tax-Dodge, the millions raised are divided among a few—a set-up for corruption. One person who served as mayor and councilman for 50 years was convicted of fraudulently claiming Tax-Dodge City as his legal residence. Last year a city administrator was indicted for misappropriation of public funds. The biggest hoax, though, is calling Tax-Dodge a city. Unconvinced, a state assemblyman has sponsored a bill to disincorporate cities with fewer than 151 people.
Businesses in Tax-Dodge say disincorporation would shutter them, and the Teamsters Union opposes any loss of local jobs. But every city must have residents, which is where Tax-Dodge (real name Vernon, Calif.) fails. It might be a great place to work, but no one wants to live there.
GREAT PIECE! I pray and hope that millions will wake up this minute and realize what the implication is for all of us. I think we are already heading towards the stone age!
The population in Ohio, like that in most of the country, is not highly concentrated, as it is in the DC-NY corridor, where trains are useful. It's simple and easy here to simply hop in the car and drive. Trains would have been an absurdity - even high-speed ones, which would in any case have been purely imaginary.
I don't know who pushes these rail projects, or why. Perhaps it's planners who see only what they want to see. Most people in America live widely spread out, in the suburbs or the countryside, and most American cities are relatively small, with probably many more job sites scattered throughout the suburbs and exurbs than in central cities. Planners may wish it were otherwise, but it's not.
Public-media funding includes only about ten percent government money. Cutting off government funding would only require a little more fundraising, which should be easy to do. In fact, my sense is that the employees of NPR/PBS/CPB/APR/etc. would be *glad*, not devastated, to be free of government money. Ask around.
Vernon is just the tip of the iceberg. I am surprised you did not mention Bell. So much for government transparancy and corruption.
Just what we need-high speed rail. Can anyone really be serious. Of course our president can, with his wealth of experience as a "community organizer. Just what is NOT needed to get this economy going again.
There it is again in the last paragraph: "One need not be a railroad buff to see that." the editors declare. Oh Yeah? Well it sure would help to be nostagic about this mode of transportation becasue otherwise it does not make sense in a modern world. A part of every human being is nostagic to the past including past transportaiton modess such as trains. People pay big money for vacations on square rig sailing ships, Mississippi River padde wheelers, hot air ballon rides. steam engine locamotives. stage coach rides and just plain horse rides etc. These old modes of trainsportation have a compelling beauty about them and are fondly remebered in our collective subconscious.
But these old mode of transportaion are no longer viable means of transporation and can not be seriously use today as a means of transportation. These old transportaion modes are outdated and obsolete and grossly lack expected modern day performace characteristics.
It is time to realize that in America the age of intercity trains even at high speeds has long ago passed the way intercity electic trolleys passed on about a century ago for lack of economic viability. We need to move on as part of national transportation policy to more modern and much more cost effective and adaptable means of transportation. We do not need to spend enormous sums of money for the limited purpose of reminding oursleves of the past.
Electric cars will come soon enough. It's inevitable. Toyota and Honda hybrids have been around for quite a while. But electrics will certainly not be pollution free. Nothing is pollution free, not even humans. Especially not humans.
Marie (#8)
The intercity electric trolley was at its ehight about a 100 years ago after being in existance just after electric power was made more widely available in the late 1880s. The use of electric power was more economical than using horses. It died off by the 1920s when more people owned their own automobile. This was just a natural choice on the part of consumers to favor a more trechnically advanced and superior transportation choice. There was no conspiracy by automobile companies.
My point was that 100 years ago people walked away from rail transportation way before much better modern choices existed from a century of autmobile and other transportation imporvements. This is a clear case of technical progress over a century ago that did not favor rail transporation.
Today any passneger rail system is extermly heavily subsidized by government which is why state goverenments want no part of paying for the never-ending increase in cost of rail transportation for the benefit of relativley few people that use intercity rail transportation. There are just too many better and cheaper transportation choices that do not require heavy government subsidy.
If you have been paying attention to the European soveriegn debt crisis where countries such as Ireland and Greece were no longer able to sell their debt becasue ot their high rate of indebtedness relative to their GDP, you would recognize the dire impacts that too much barrowing has on a nation. These countires had to be bailed out and even now must offer very high interest payments to do so. This impact could ruin the United States economy if nations no longer were willing to risk buying our debt securities which economic experts warn could happen.
So spending another $53 billion on fast trains that will run at a loss increases the national debt by another 5+% of a trillion dollars. - a very useless and unwise economic choice whcih lacks any sense of priority or urgency of controlling our national debt.
"The cities they serve have very good public transportation, so it's not necessary to rent a car when you get there."
I hadn't thought of that. Yes, of course, that's one more excellent reason why passenger rail in Ohio - a state in which no "large" city is more than a fast four-hour drive from any other and in which no large city has either good local transit systems or a heavily centralized population - would be pointless.
The interesting thing in all this is that the federal government and local rail-travel groups have had so much success in pushing these very expensive and pointless projects, and that so many people have taken them seriously - probably simply because the governments have done so. It shows, I suppose, the power of authority in setting priorities, no matter what common sense might otherwise dictate. If the king says it, it must be true.
Dave, Dave, Dave.
You are as sharp as a tack in your analysis of the pointlessness of high speed rail transportation. You have the merits of the argument down cold and rightly conclude that this fast train proposal does not make sense.
You say "I don't know who pushes these rail projects, or why."
"
Here you pull a "Little Red Riding Hood" on us. You remember the nursery story of the little girl who goes to her Grandma's house in the woods where she thinks she talking to her grandma but is instead talking to the wolf who is in grandma's bed and dressed up as Grandma? The little girl senses something is wrong and makes a series of observations that are 100% correct about the wolf such as "Oh grandma what big eyes you have." etc but somehow just can conclude that this is not Grandma and further this thing in Grandma's bed with the big eyes, big snout and big teeth has all the characteristics of the wolf which everyone knows your supposed to be on the lookout for the wolf when you are in the woods.
In the woods of patronage politcs who benefits by pretending to be Grandma?
Who didn't benefit from Sesame Street?
Also, they provide the most detailed reporting available and provide vast amounts of information.
They provide up-scale levels of music, theater and stuff we don't see anywhere else.
On political issues, they present players from all sides of political spectrum that no other broadcast outlet does.
Heck, the McGlauphlin Group, Inside Washington, etc, have a balanced panel of guest that no other outlet comes close to.
That being said, I believe NPR and Public Broadcasting TV, can stand on their own merits, and the amount the governt cuts from their funding will easily be picked up and exceded by private advertizers, which they in effect do already anyway.
Jim