Why Do Conservatives oppose High Speed Rail?

Biggest deficits and largest increases in the debt in our history. Not only his stimlulus but his HUGE increases in the deficit the last 4 years which has done NOTHING to get us into a full recovery.

 

Au contraire, the wealthiest are enjoying record profits from our social, bailout.

 

One of the freight lines (CSX I believe) advertises on TV that it hauls one ton of freight 450 miles on one gallon of fuel. I doubt electrification could be any more efficient than that.

 

Fossil fuel pollution may still be toxic to our environment. Fusion may enable scale economies fit for modern ecnoomic times.

 

Private industry would probably be all in if they can get the taxpayers to buy the rights-of-way, construct the tracks and terminals, and provide them with government-insured low interest rate loans to buy the rolling stock. It's the way corporations roll these days. None of the liabilities, all of the profits.

 

Everyone wants fusion, but diesel fuel is fairly low polluting. It does give off a lot of soot.

 

I think it would be great in hubs where the cities are 400 or 500 miles apart. LA to Vegas to SF to Phoenix or Chicago to St. Louis to Dallas to New Orleans or whatever. Long haul, 200 mph won't compete with 550 mph.

 

Taxcutter says:
I haven't seen anywhere that anybody proposed to move freight on HSR. That would foul up passenger service for the privileged few. Faster freight service would be achieved by electrification of existing freight railroad mainlines.

 

You implied all these types of programs are a waste when this would be 100% wrong. You must look at each project on it's own merits...

 

Ignoring politics for a moment, the fact that the economy is sluggish and tentative 4-1/2 years after the very short recession, should point out that government cannot create sustainable and long term jobs except for those who are hired to work for the government. Using stimulus and other forms of welfare the government can only provide temporary jobs/work in hopes that in parallel the PRIVATE ECONOMY will improve and employ more workers. I don't look at the current economy and think it is a bad economy...it is what it is based on demand of it's products and services. 140 million people are employed and many businesses/corporations are doing just fine. The government has the problem of dealing with people who don't pay taxes and don't have incomes to support themselves. The level of this government intervention is dependent on the political climate...today that seems to be government welfare...sort of like giving everyone fish instead of teaching them to fish or requiring them to fish...

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Au contraire...all other Americans are enjoying the successes of these profits...

 

Why must I look at each project on it's own merits? If government wraps these things up and funds them in one giant program, then I will look at the overall cost of that program, not each little part of it so that I conveniently (for the statists) ignore the rest.

 

Fusion plants could be underground and help power water desalination and transport, and high speed rail.

 

Don't get me wrong, DP, I love fusion. It's a long way off, though.

 

Nope; it could happen in two terms; all we need is enough Faith in Capitalism and an official Mint.

 

Faith in capitalism??? C'mon man. Only when the taxpayer has funded all the research and paid for all the infrastructure will capitalism want in. And the it will be half-arsed. Witness private space exploration.

 

I meant ceteris paribus. I already know WWII was an example of Socialism having a work ethic instead of laissez-fare's laziness to accomplish something Important, to us in the US.

 

100% false.

The deficit has fallen every year under the Obama Presidency. There goes your credibility.

 

Our GLORIOUS airline industry has me stuck in Houston with no bag! They can't even located it. I'm headed back to Buffalo tomorrow and they THINK my bag never even left Buffalo -_-

My flight Monday was cancelled. They rushed me on another flight to Chicago (mistake). Spent 2 hours delayed in Chicago. Got on a flight that went Chicago - Nashville - Florida - Houston.. and 7 hours later.. NO BAG.

Over 25,000 flights delayed or cancelled in the last week. Thousands of people stranded. Thousands of bags misplaced.

BUT, the airline industry is great, eh?

 

I believe better aqueducts and rail roads could help transport all of that potential potable drinking water to any State thay have some drought.

 

That "couple of project" has paid steady dividends for 75 years.

Not one of them was within the financial reach of the immediate communities they serve, and no private enterprise stepped up to build them.

Yes, you can measure then against opportunity costs.

The cost of poverty in a Depression as the people employed doing that work would not have had jobs.

The cost to local taxpayers of having to pave unpaved streets.

The cost to public health if the local hospital had continued to be a makeshift arrangement operating out of an old Victorian house.

The cost the the public if the park and marina on the south side of town had remained a swamp.

There's your opportunity cost.

 

Our glorious airline industry stranded me in Philadelphia for eight hours before cancelling my flight, took two and a half hours to get rebooked, and then they didn't forward my luggage from the connecting flight.

As you know, when things go wrong, all the customer service people disappear!

So, for all you wingnuts sitting in your trailer parks ridiculing high speed rail, I've got two words for you, and one of them is YOU!!!!!

 

I believe we could expand rail road capacity in the same manner as freeway road capacity; why cater to only one segment of the population when promoting the general welfare should result in Pareto Optimal solutions.

 

Are the least wealthy really "enjoying" the successes of the wealthiest when the right insists, at almost every turn, to reduce social spending for those not "earning" record profits?

 

It looks like California's Lieutenant Governor is bailing on their bullet train nonsense...

A New Bullet Train Critic

The latest indication that Gavin Newsom wants to succeed fellow Democrat Jerry Brown as California's governor is his public denunciation of the increasingly unpopular bullet train project, which Mr. Newsom once supported.

"I would take the dollars and redirect it to other, more pressing infrastructure needs, and I am not the only Democrat that feels this way," said Mr. Newsom, the state's lieutenant governor, in radio interview last week. And I've got to tell you, I am one of the few that just said it publicly." The comments were a mild rebuke of the governor, who has stood by the beleaguered public works project.

But back in 2008 Mr. Newsom was also a bullet train booster. He campaigned for a high-speed rail ballot measure authorizing $10 billion in bonds for the 500-mile train from the Bay Area to Los Angeles. As the choo-choo's costs have exploded from $38 billion to $68 billion—which is likely a low-ball estimate—voters have been disabused of the fanciful notion that the federal government and private investors would be its primary financiers.

"We don't have the federal dollars that we were hoping for—only about $3 billion has come forward. The private sector hasn't stepped up," the lieutenant governor noted. "That said, the governor is hell bent on doing the first phase of this in that area you just referenced, the central part of the state."

This isn't the first time Mr. Newsom has side-swiped Mr. Brown, who pushed him out of the gubernatorial race in 2010. Two years ago, the lieutenant governor reproached Mr. Brown for misleading college students by telling them that raising taxes would help avert a tuition increase. "That's just not true," Mr. Newsom, who sits on the University of California Board of Regents, told a San Francisco radio show.

The goal of Mr. Newsom's ostensibly well-meaning criticism of the governor, then as now, is to present himself as the level-headed, honest guy in Sacramento. But the lieutenant governor, a rising star in the party, is also transparently aligning himself with public opinion. As he explained last week, "I think I'm where the public was and is" on high-speed rail.

Polls over the past two years have routinely showed that voters have turned against high-speed rail and would unplug the bullet train were it put up for another vote. A USC Dornsife/LA Times poll last September found that 70% of voters want a referendum, with a nine-point plurality outright opposed to its continuance.

What's amazing isn't that Mr. Newsom has flipped on the train, but that so few other Democrats have. That should speak volumes about the ideological fervor that guides California's Democratic party.

 

I believe we need a simpler plan. Would a simple Standard of 100 mph, minimum for railroads, be any worse as public sector intervention in private sector markets?