Jesus Passion made present John 18 1 19 42
5 weeks ago
Feb 26, 2009
America wants to know: When will our highways start making some MONEY already?
Tom Laskawy names a frustration I share: why do we insist on talking about Amtrak like it's a private-sector business and should be turning a profit? It's a publicly owned agency that provides a clear service, analogous to roads and parks and the armed services. Why does everyone compare it instead to airlines and cars? (Well, maybe they don't NOW, but they did back when Amtrak suffered from the comparison...)
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I believe roads are funded by the $.38 or so tax we pay on every gallon of gas. In fact I believe gas taxes are used to fund all sorts of projects.
ReplyDeleteIf you want to argue it should be funded similar to the armed services, good luck with that. Lets see... if we don't fund the armed services we'll be overrun quicker than France. If we don't fund Amtrak, people will drive and pay gas taxes.
Both the armed services and Amtrak provide clear public services. The fact that one is more immediately crucial than the other--and you're right, it is--isn't the point.
ReplyDeleteYes, roads are funded by gas taxes, and when the gas taxes aren't enough to cover all the highway projects, Congress steps in with infusions from the general fund, like it did last year. But more importantly, I hope you're not suggesting that the gas tax is a simple sales tax that only affects people who buy gas for their cars. It's built into the price of the transit card, airline tickets, and delivery costs I pay for instead of paying for a car and buying gas, not to mention anything I or anyone else buys that got transported on a truck, including bicycles and accessories. And I have a problem with none of this, because a highway is a public good.
So is passenger rail. And I'm not arguing that it should be funded at the same LEVEL as highways or the military, only that we should think about it as the same KIND of public good, at a smaller scale.
And, by the way, I'd be more than happy to have private passenger rail, with competing providers. This is what we used to have, and then the federal government stepped in and created the heavily subsidized highway system, and passenger rail inevitably declined, and Amtrak's the salvaged shell of that old system. So when conservatives make the case--and I'm not saying YOU'RE doing this, but people do--that Amtrak should simply have to compete in a free market w/ other modes of transportation, the irony is staggering. Free markets didn't make passenger rail decline; big-government policy decisions did.
Seems like rail is one of your topics of choice. It is great to have a good rail system. Many of the conservatives don't get it where rail is concerned. They do raise some legitimate concerns. We do live in a much larger country than Japan, so the comparisons to living in Tokyo doesn't work if you are living in Nebraska. Having rail to some hub cities works much like a system of airports which still leaves the need for rental cars and a viable road system. Changing people's attitudes about who rides rail systems will take some time. Many suburban areas in the city I grew up in will not allow rail hubs because they bring in "undesirable" (read poor, minority). Should the government subsidize rail more? Probably. Is now a good time to be talking increasing taxes to fund this type of project? That is a little better question with no simple answer.
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