LOL. MBiker, If you want to get personal, vent frustration, throw around meaningless cutesy metaphors or bash the President, go ahead. But don’t confuse it with making a decent point or being factually correct. California has the best plans in place for high speed rail development. You might not like that fact but your personal unhappiness doesn’t change that fact.
For you to think he could accomplish both things - within two years!-- shows some real disconnect from reality, the kind of wrongheadedness encouraged by AM talk radio and FOX brainwashing.
I don’t watch Fox News, and I don’t listen to talk radio. Candidate Obama made promises, and as one of his supporters, I am holding him to those promises.
I might have plans to earn a doctoral degree, but if I don’t have the money to pay the tuition and buy the books, it isn’t achievable. The best plans are achievable, have measurable outcomes, and have a time table. California’s plan is missing a pretty important component, the “achievable” part.
Hey, if I am wrong, tell me how California intends to finance its plans. I would love to be proven wrong.
CCC, the multi-billion $ plans of a bankrupt government (California) are equally worthless. How do you constantly avoid the basic question - how can we pay hundreds of billions for something, when we simply don’t have the money?
“I don’t watch Fox News…”
You should. It’s very fair and balanced.
…for something we don’t need…
“California has the best plans in place…”
California’s “plan” is to add $46 billion to it’s existing $20 billion debt and to draw more passengers than are carried by Amtrak, nationwide, and to do it without any subsidies. They “plan” to push it through afluent peninsula towns on an elevated structure in spite of opposition by residents and their elected representatives. The first leg “planned” to be built connects two towns that are so small, the Census Bureau doesn’t track their population. California is so deep in debt that they’re bonds are considered junk.
If those are “the best plans in place”, Then high speed rail is surely dead.
“I don’t watch Fox News…”
You should. It’s very fair and balanced.
Now that there’s funny. I don’t care who you are.
Here’s some more humor for you:
http://www.alternet.org/story/16892
http://www.alternet.org/story/149193/study_confirms_that_fox_news_makes_you_stupid
Fox News Makes You Dumb and Dumber!!
http://gawker.com/5714669/science-the-more-fox-news-you-watch-the-stupider-you-get
Thanks. I enjoyed it too. You liberals are so predictable. Pavlov would be proud.
A recent article in “The Economist” a very credible British business magazine, throws serious doubt on all these plans. Even with federal subsidies from a near-bankrupt government, the various states are now getting cold feet. The reason, of course is a very sluggish economy and mountains of state debt.
The Economist agrees that although high speed rail in selected high population density areas is a good IDEA, it’s likely UNAFFORDABLE in today’s financial climate.
Those countries that have these wonderful trains, mainly France and Japan had very long term plans and their dense population made it easy to implement it.
I watch Fox news every now and then. My two objections to it are being shouted at as though I were a stupid and unruly child, and the fact that Fox news is “pre-digested” so I don’t have to think about what it tells me. News is like food, it’s best fresh and not pre-digested.
Public television suffers from some of the same, although in a more graceful but “holier than thou” manner. It’s best to take both networks with a grain of salt, and come to your own conclusions. Neither has the complete answer.
Hitler really understood propaganda. He said, no matter how big the lie, if you tell it often enough and loud enough people will believe it. Fox news would be greatly admired by Putin if it was a Russian company. It’s exactly the way he pushes his views on the Russian public.
It’s very interesting to watch the European and Asian versions of CNN. Both are more interesting and cover a very broad range of subjects.
You liberals are so predictable. Pavlov would be proud.
It’s interesting you would call me a liberal, as I seem to echo your sentiment on high speed rail and fiscal conservatism.
That’s the problem with people who watch Faux News. They think they can fit people into their nice neat little categories. It helps them simplify the world so they can demonize people and so they think they can understand it. Joseph Goebbels would be proud.
Thanks; this plan would not use any federal funding, but the local municipalities could make a contribution to the infrastructure. Once operating this railsystem would have to earn its keep. The fare comparison here is air fares; 2 airlines run commuter planes at 35 minute intervals. So there is quite a bit of room for a profit margin.
Kids, seniors and others not in a hurry will likely continue to use a greyhound style diesel bus.
The population in many parts of the USA is comparably dense as in Europe.
About tax revenue to support it, although I have already answered this question, I will do it again, but then I will bow out because this thread, which started out with reasonable discussion in the first few pages, is starting to attract angry trolls now.
If back in 1970 someone predicted that in 2010 the US would be just as rich but that the distribution of wealth would be so bad, and tax rates on the mega-rich tiny minority who control 90+% of all the wealth would be so low, that rich states like California would be canceling fire department services even in areas that have extreme fire hazards, that person would have been called a crazy dystopian. If that someone also had predicted a trillion dollar needless war, they might have been encouraged to go write science fiction. But that person would have been right, of course.
Point is, tax rates on the wealthy are ridiculous low, historically. And in fact higher tax rates on the wealthy in the past have usually corresponded with economic prosperity. Tax rates for the wealthiest were often well over 50% at points 20th century. These days, we have even more of the country’s monetary resources locked up in a miniscule sector of the population that enjoying incredibly low tax rates, and this is a main cause of our tax revenue problems. Top tax rates are 25% lower that the historical average. If we put the top tax rates up to levels that we have in the 1960’s or 1920’s, we would be able to get our country running again, pay down the debt, invest in our infrastructure, and stop the trend toward being a second rate nation. That’s the reality of the situation, but besides from the Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman, you won’t hear about it in common discourse very often. Hence the more recent answers on this page from people who’ve been propagandized, full of outrage that we might build something as good as what other countries have, and how we can’t afford this and that and the country is bankrupt. The Economist will say that and the Wall St Journal will and CNN and Rush Limbaugh but they won’t mention the ridiculously low tax rates for the wealthy. That’s just the fact about what’s causing our revenue problems and why Europe is trouncing us in the infrastructure department, as in high speed rail. But things might be changing as people wake up, so hopefully we’ll have a fairer tax system when these train lines start being built here. That’s it, Merry Christmas Happy New Year, get out of your cars and be healthier happier and wiser
If anyone needs to pay 50% tax rates to fund your program, you aren’t spreading the tax burden equitably. We can pay off our deficit and have money left over without overtaxing anyone so extremely.
Sorry, but social equality is not achieved through redistributing cash. If someone wants to avoid poverty in the United States, all he or she needs to do is graduate from high school, work full time, and wait to have children until he or she can afford them. Anyone who does all three of these things reduces her or his chances of being poor from 12% to 2%.
This is a basic issue of fairness. I believe we should have progressive taxes, but to tax anyone 50% is grand larceny. Nobody should have to pay more than 20% of their income in taxes.
Social equality is achieved by removing barriers to upward mobility.
We?ve beat this to death before.
The long and short of it is that in most (read 90%+) of the US doesn?t have the population density to support even modest forms of mass transit. Once you move more than a 100 miles or so from the coasts you can?t generate enough ridership to even come close to paying for it.
In order for mass transit to work it has to go where I want, or close to where I need to go, and it has to run when I want to go. So at the bare minimum it has to run say once an hour on time every day, now in ND with a population of 600,000 with a fraction of them living in any kind of city, tell me just how are you going to service those people? Could you even come close to justifying spending billions of dollars to service the state of ND, SD, KS or most states in the Midwest?
Where the population demands its, yes we should be pushing mass transit, but it doesn?t make since everywhere.
My opinions are subject to change with new facts.
“The population in many parts of the USA is comparably dense as in Europe.”
Amtrak already runs service i the Northeast Corridor. It s subsidized because they can’t charge enough to cover costs. This is on an existing rail line, not on one that might be built at today’s prices. I’ve ridden these trains, and I like them. It would be nice if they stopped less frequently, but I am not allowed to buy the expensive Acela Express tickets. They are almost 3 times the cost of regular tickets, and the trip is 4 hours instead of 5. That doesn’t seem like much bang for the buck.
There is a maglev train in Shanghai, China that travels 19 miles from the outskirts of the city to the Pudong International Airport. The trip takes about 8 minutes. But anyone traveling to city center must ride an additional 20 minutes on a subway. This railway was finished in 2003 and cost $133,000,000,000 US to build. We could get one line from DC to NYC for less than $2 trillion in 2003 dollars. That hardly seems like a good deal for the Chinese - or for us if we decided to build that astonishingly expensive maglev you want.
Cars,
One last time: America doesn’t have a revenue problem. It has a spending problem. Same goes for California, New Jersey, Illinois and several other states. Any questions?
And cars don’t cause cancer and motorcycles don’t cause pimples and bicycles don’t cause impotence. Okay?
Finally, if we could get back to the silly post that kicked all this off, high speed rail is a waste of money we don’t have on a product we don’t need.
Sheesh!
Whitey,
There’s much wisdom in your post. If you ever choose to run for office on that platform, you’ll have a bright political future. I’d vote for you in a heartbeat.
The government encouraged people that should not have gotten loans to take them because the decision makers foolishly believed that housing prices could go up forever.
Sorry…but that wasn’t the government…that was private business… I.E. BANKS…It was the banks that were encouraging people to take out loans…it was banks going to colleges and even high-schools getting students to get a Visa or Mastercard…It was Banks that relaxed their lending practices on Credit cards…knowing full well that nearly 25% were falling very very deep in debt…and then they continued and enhanced their policies.
For a fair tax rate…
Let’s go back to when this country was founded…Then I don’t have to pay ANY tax…Don’t own a business…and I don’t have any land used for agriculture.