Our media at lie: the funny part is that it is all there for those of us who really didn’t have to read the article. It is just buried between lies, untruths and evasions.
1. Most of the public is in favor of the subsidies. Asked in abstract there is nothing the government spends money on the public isn’t in favor of besides waste, welfare and foreign aid. You only get honest answers when you first ask people if they will pay more in taxes. When they say they already pay too much, you must then remind them that eliminating waste is a chimera [the waste is there but we built a system that maximizes waste to minimize chances for corruption – we are so terrified of influence leading to profit [that New Testament thing plus Federal era Republican virtue from the classic revival of Roman concepts] that we embed everything in process so deep as to make avoidance of petty obstructionism by interested parties virtually impossible. My favorite was the mohair subsidy that was pure waste but was major $ in two Congressional districts and spare change to voters who don’t like to listen to boring budget debates. Getting rid of THAT one only took 40 years after mohair stopped being something the military needed for uniforms. And the same two Congresscritters still try to bring it back. Presuming anyone is still paying attention to your imaginary lecture by now you must then do a poll asking the voters to pick where they want to spend marginal dollars. Fat chance that anyone but policy wonks and economically interested parties pays attention.
2. Rail only makes sense in the context of mass urban corridors. YUP. Then it makes best sense where you make gasoline expensive. Gee so maybe a policy focus on cheap gas has costs – DUH. People are in favor of mass transit existing so other people will take it, thereby cutting the traffic that THEY have to face. You will change the marginal equations when you change the price of gasoline by massive taxation [LOL] AND change the land use patterns. Visit NYC someday. NYC into the inner ring of suburban counties is a rail era metro. You put in the rail line and then build around the stations. However it has a gasoline era economy. Everyone lives everywhere and works everywhere. Except for into Manhattan there is no commuter pattern. To make rail work you have to rebuild the cities. You also need nationalized zoning for land use. Compared to this $10 / gallon taxes on gasoline are politically easy. Land use, real estate values, local control of schools – these all mesh. People will kill over this. Their house is their major store of wealth. They want a zoning board they can threaten to lynch and make it stick. That is why the places like Manhattan where most people are renters are seen as alien to Merika.
3. The government builds the roads and airports – well sort of. Actually we pay separate taxes for them. These taxes go into trust funds which operate at surplus. The Feds then refuse to spend the money to hide the size of the rest of the deficit. The GOP Congress began catch-up but…So if we think the public loves rail transit SO much how about a dedicated tax to pay for it. So for say 2 cents a gallon on gasoline and heating oil we can pay for the Amtrak boondoggle. Want to take bets how far that one goes. One party treats raising taxes as a form of pedophilia and the other seems to think government dollars come from under cabbage leaves like babies do.
4. The real reason that Amtrak is untouchable is Joe Biden. For what is a spare change provision all it takes is one Senator with seniority to make it their hobbyhorse. Amtrak is one of Biden’s. The Senate is barely functional. It has rules geared to a government where a million dollars was a lot of money and issues could fester for a decade until the Senate got around to coping. So in order to move on minor stuff it needs what amounts to universal consent – any one Senator with enough seniority can be enough of a pain on enough other Senate business until he is given his treat to just shut up. The structure wasn’t made for an eleven trillion dollar economy, a three hundred million person nation or playing hyperpower to the planet. Byrd paves the state of West Virginia with highways and government office buildings named after him. Trent Lott gets ships built. Biden gets to play with his choo-choo trains.
Scott
David Gunn, 65 and a glutton for punishment, left retirement to run Amtrak. His office is in magnificently restored Union Station, a relic of something Gunn knows is gone forever -- the era of glamorous railroading. He explains his challenge by taking a visitor on a walk back to the 1930s.
He walks to the end of Union Station's passenger platform, looking north up the Washington-New York-Boston corridor. Almost everything that strikes the eye, Gunn says, from the transformers to the poles holding overhead electric power wires, was here in the 1930s, if not 1910. The foundations of more than 9,800 poles in the corridor are, Gunn says, "in trouble."
Deferred maintenance cannot forever be deferred for this railroad that two years ago mortgaged part of Penn Station in Manhattan to meet $300 million in expenses. Gunn's predecessor then said he was "absolutely confident" that Amtrak would reach "operational self-sufficiency by the congressionally mandated deadline in 2003."
"Fanciful" is Gunn's dismissal of the idea that Amtrak can end its deficit. Fanciful, too, is the idea that the government will quit subsidizing Amtrak operations in the Northeast Corridor. Without subsidies, those operations would end for 1.1 million passengers a month, who would be put into the corridor's already congested highways and air space.
Furthermore, it is fanciful to think Congress will subsidize the Northeast Corridor without legislative logrolling to guarantee continuing subsidies of long-distance trains (routes of at least 500 miles) beyond the corridor, where five-sixths of Americans live. Trains such as the Sunset Limited, which is not crowded on its runs from Orlando to Los Angeles via New Orleans. Or the Texas Eagle, which, according to the Wall Street Journal, lost $38.4 million in 2001 ($1.70 for every $1 of revenue) on its 33-hour runs -- its meanderings, actually; it averages 39 mph -- between Chicago and San Antonio.
Amtrak accounts for only three-tenths of 1 percent of intercity travel. Do at least Amtrak's Northeast Corridor operations make money? There are two answers: Don't be daft. And: Yes, if you disregard sufficient expenses. The same is true of the 12 daily trains that carry 200,000 passengers a month -- up 25 percent over last year -- in the San Diego-Los Angeles-Santa Barbara corridor. But by performing valuable services in congested regions, these services may help force the government to quit pretending that self-sufficiency is just over the horizon and to decide what kind of intercity rail service it wants to pay for.
Gunn's goals are minimal: "stability" of the physical condition of plants and equipment and of the operating deficit. His candor is unprecedented: He says that for the next five years, Amtrak will need subsidies declining only from $1.8 billion to $1.5 billion a year. That includes $4.5 billion of capital spending and, more depressing, $3.5 billion of operating subsidies.
"The marketplace," he says, "has been completely distorted by government investment." Government provides billions of dollars for traffic control and runways for airlines, highways for cars and trucks and buses. Manhattan, the nation's priciest real estate, is covered with streets that drivers do not pay the full cost of.
Perhaps Amtrak, or at least its Northeast Corridor operations, could be made into a private train-operating company, with federal and state governments responsible for infrastructure, as they are for airports and highways. Certainly Amtrak's financial distress should produce labor concessions, in pay and work rules, similar to those that bankruptcy proceedings have wrung from airline unions.
But Gunn, who has experience with five metropolitan transit systems (in Toronto, Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington) knows that America is big and mostly thinly populated and that rail passenger service makes sense for short runs in densely populated areas. Nowhere in America are there the conditions that make Japan's high-speed trains profitable: dense population, negligible air service, very high gas prices to discourage driving. In 2000 Americans took 665 million plane trips and 22.5 million Amtrak trips.
Geography sets strict parameters of passenger rail productivity. An airliner, Gunn notes, can make two Chicago-to-Los Angeles round trips in a day; a train takes 45 hours to go one way. Thirty-two years and more than $40 billion in subsidies (in today's dollars) after Amtrak was cobbled together from the remnants of various passenger rail systems, a nationwide poll shows 71 percent public support for subsidizing Amtrak at current or increased levels. Support for Amtrak is strong among all regions, ages, education levels and income groups.
Amtrak -- long-distance trains, legislative logrolling and all -- should be counted as a cost of democracy. It is here to stay, like true love, only more so.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
posted by scott 10:39 PM