But I will point out there are subsidies and subsidies. Subsidized oil benefits pretty much everyone. Even if you don’t drive, you can bet your ass pretty much everything you buy was made or transported or both using susidized oil.
Subsidizing passenger rail / high speed rail pretty much only benifits a few riders. And as Sam points out it, it may well cause more harm than good. Spending money to make matters worse aint exactly a good idea.
Tax the crap outa carbon. I’d love to go nuclear/synthetic fuel and tell the Middle East to pound sand.
If the rail lines ameliorate traffic congestion, they benefit everyone. Less congestion saves time (money), fuel (money), lungs (money), and the environment (ultimately, money). Building more roads just tends to lead to more congestion (at least if the roads aren’t toll roads). Ultimately, I think this means that rail should only be subsidized where congestion/traffic is highest, since that should provide the most marginal benefit.
On the other hand, if oil prices keep going up (which is a certainty in the long term), the era of cheap air travel may end, and intercity HSR might be a good thing to have. As with all things, building now will cost less than building later, especially since labor, land, and borrowing costs at the moment are at relative lows.
The rural subsidies to bring aircraft service to small communities. Of course, this is not necessarily a subsidy but a payment for service. The airlines don’t need that subsidy to be profitable - they could just stop servicing those small communities. It goes without saying that high speed rail isn’t about to stop in those communities either, so it’s really a moot point.
Another ‘subsidy’ is the money paid to airlines to remain part of the emergency reserve fleet. Again - not really a subsidy, but more a payment for service. It costs money to maintain a reserve capacity in your air operations, and the government pays for it. This is actually a service the airlines are providing the nation.
There are subsidies for airport construction or enhancement by local governments, which mainly take the form of low-interest or zero interest bond issues. But those are decisions made at the local level. And increasingly, such construction is being paid for by passengers in the form of special upgrade taxes.
These subsidies pale in comparison to the subsidies passenger rail gets. when compared on a passenger-mile basis.
As for highways - between 1990 and 2002, the years I have numbers for, highway users actually paid $1.91 per thousand passenger-miles MORE to the federal government than the federal government paid out in highway funds. Not only was it not subsidized, it was a source of revenue to the government. Explicitly so - the increase in fuel taxes was sold as a deficit-reduction measure.
During the same period, passenger rail subsidies were $186.35 per thousand passenger-miles.
Commercial aviation’s subsidies rose and fell during the same period because the various taxes changed. The highest subsidy year amounted to $11.37 per thousand passenger miles, but in 1998, 1999, and 2000 commercial aviation actually paid more into the system than it got back. Overall, the average subsidy during the period when rail received $186.35 per passenger mile was $4.99 per thousand passenger miles - about 2.7% of the subsidy level of passenger rail.
So sure, by all means subsidize passenger trains at exactly the same level as airlines. That will shut them all down.
What a ridiculous argument. Am I being subsidized by the government because i breathe ‘the public’s air’? And don’t trains ALSO use the public’s air? Oh, and how about all the land-use rights-of-way and eminent domain claims high speed rail requires? That’s not counted in their subsidy. Let’s compare apples to apples and not tilt the playing field unfairly, okay? Because if you want to tilt the playing field like that, I’d have to point out that although fuel taxes pay all of the cost of the federal highway system, there are positive externalities that the public gets from that transportation system. High-Speed Rail isn’t going to get a fire truck to your home if it starts on fire or get an ambulance to your house if you have a heart attack. So let’s not go digging around for every silly cost or benefit we can invent to prove our case. Let’s stick to accepted figures put out by the government agencies charged with doing that accounting.
And using those figures, it’s clear that passenger rail already gets subsidies an order of magnitude or more greater than any other transportation method. HSR would increase that dramatically.
You cannot win the subsidy argument - all you can do is try to prove the case that passenger rail subsidies are a good deal for the public. And I think the evidence is against you there as well.
By the way, I’m opposed to air subsidies as well - here in Canada, we privatized our air traffic control system, and it improved by every measure. NavCanada is now a model for how to run an air traffic control system - and it receives no funding from the government. We do not subsidize air transport at all, and it’s doing fine. The Republicans are currently trying to get aviation subsidies cut, but they’ve been blocked by Democrats in the Senate.
Incidentally, when the government ran Canada’s air traffic control system, it has to be subsidized to the tune of $150-$200 million per year. It was sold to NavCanada for $1.5 billion dollars, and now runs at a profit. Furthermore, the fees that NavCanada charges the airlines are more than compensated for by the money in fuel it has saved the airlines through more efficient routing and fewer navigation-related delays. Everyone came out a winner - the airlines, the government, the public, and NavCanada.
So why don’t you just privatize the FAA’s air traffic control system? Then you can dump the subsidies (small as they are) altogether.
How does spending money in the Middle East to continue Middle Eastern oil production subsidize oil operations in the U.S.? If anything, it does the opposite. A disruption of Middle Eastern oil production would cause a skyrocketing of oil prices, and all the U.S. producers would benefit.
As far as using the public’s air for free, if you want to go that route, then who are the primary polluters? Is it the producers of oil or is it the consumers? While there is no doubt that there is pollution in the production of oil and the refining of it into various products, that would be dwarfed by the pollution caused by the actual consumption of the fuels. Therefore, that supposed subsidy is really one being given to the manufacturers, airlines, commercial transportation fleet, and retail users, right?
There is no evidence that HSR leads to lower congestion. For one thing, the number of passengers that would be offloaded onto it make up only a few percentage points of road use. For another, if HSR pushes freight onto the roads it could make congestion worse. Finally, congestion happens because the roads are free to use. Congestion itself becomes the ‘cost’ that ultimately sets demand for road use. If you removed half the cars from the road and eliminated congestion, you would simply create incentives for other people to start using those roads, and you would stimulate more construction of homes and businesses serviced by those roads - until you hit the congestion limit again.
So you’re saying that if you offload car passengers into trains, it wil lower congestion, but if you offload them onto a parallel road or into an extra lane you’ll get more congestion? Can you reconcile those two beliefs?
I have a much better, much cheaper, much more effective way to reduce congestion - congestion pricing of roads. Congestion is a classic example of externality cost and market failure - every vehicle that uses the road lowers the utility of the road for other vehicles. So bring market forces into it and impose congestion fees. We have the technology to do this transparently and with full respect to privacy. Push for that, and I’ll be right with you.
Even if it uses more energy than the cars, costs so much that only the wealthy can use it, and doesn’t necessary terminate where people need to be?
No, as with all things, building later costs less than building now. Look up the time-value of money.
For that matter, one of the hidden costs of high speed rail is that the projects take a long time to build, and are very capital intensive. So you have to put up the money first, then wait years for the revenue to start coming back. This is not a trivial matter - it’s one of the key costs of nuclear power, for example. Obama wants to spend $53 billion to kick-start high speed rail. That’s $53 billion that isn’t earning interest or being put to productive use elsewhere in the economy, for an ‘investment’ that won’t even begin to generate revenue for probably a decade.
It may be correct how you are describing it, but it seems to me that I’m having trouble by you saying that the money is not put to productive use elsewhere in the economy.
Getting rid of foreign dependence on such a vital element of the economy as oil should be a priority for all conservatives. And especially when it puts you in the pocket in various shitty countries that can best be described as enemies. And that the oil money you do send abroad is used to spread a hateful ideology that stands against everything that is your own interest. It is a matter of national interest. As a conservative, I’m willing to tax oil and give subsidies to other forms of energy sources and transportation systems for that purpose. Including renewable energy and trains.
I want people to subsidize SUV’s to save energy. If subsidizing SUV’s will end our dependence on foreign oil, I’m all for it.
See the problem with that statement? It kind of begs the question as to whether subsidizing SUV’s actually would save oil, doesn’t it? That’s the whole question, and you just sidestepped it by simply throwing trains in with renewable energy as something that will definitely reduce oil consumption.
The problem with that is the data. I already posted hard data of real-world, measured energy efficiency of all the current heavy rail passenger trains in America. On average, they don’t do any better than cars. The worst line gets the kind of passenger-mile energy efficiency of a large SUV.
Not only that, but at the time of the measurements the auto fleet only had had a CAFE average of around 20 mpg. By 2020, the CAFE average has been mandated to be 35mpg, at which point trains as a group will be significantly less energy efficient than cars.
And that’s just comparing them straight across. Now add in the systemic effects - especially the potential for freight to be pushed off the tracks and onto the roads, and the situation gets even worse for passenger trains.
In short, you don’t get to assume that HSR is going to result in America saving energy. They could very well make energy consumption go up.
Now, the trains run on electricity, and cars currently run on gasoline. But if the future leads us to electric cars, then that advantage goes away. And if the electricity for the trains comes from coal, we could see our carbon footprint per passenger mile actually get worse.
Finally, you have to consider the other drawbacks of trains: For one, they are a huge infrastructure investment. That means they will be white elephants impossible to kill. The cities they serve could change in their transportation demands, resulting in trains running half empty. That would be absolutely devastating to their energy efficiency. We could have breakthroughs in other modes of transportation that makes them significantly better, but we’ll still be stuck with the trains (I say ‘we’ because Canada has its own continuing debate about bringing back HSR).
And you have to ask yourself if the cost is worth it. That 53 billion dollars Obama has committed is not the final price tag. It’s not even close. It’s just seed capital. By the time the proposed HSR links are built out, there will be hundreds of billions of dollars sunk into them. The California HSR system, originally priced at $45 billion, is now already expected to cost between 100 and 200 billion dollars. Multiply that by all the other proposed links getting money from Obama’s 53 billion, and you could ultimately be talking close to a trillion dollars. And then they might have to be subsidized to the tune of tens of billions of dollars per year forever after.
A nuclear plant can be built for about $4 billion. For the price of HSR, you could build 100-200 of them. Coincidentally, it would take about 200 nuclear plants to replace ALL of America’s oil consumption energy, if the things that consume oil could be converted to electricity or hydrogen. HSR might not reduce it at all, or if it does it would only be by a few percentage points.
This is the kind of thing I was talking about when I said the left needs to be more hard-headed and think these things through more. Cost-benefit analysis, opportunity costs, affordability, real-world history instead of theoretical best-case analysis… These are the things engineers do to figure out the best way to tackle problems. It’s time politicians and acticists started thinking more clearly and applying these practices.
Of course, spending money anywhere in America would also result in jobs being created.
But your post is a perfect example of the real reason behind the heavy push for HSR - rent seeking. There is no doubt that HSR will require labor, and that will result in employment. It will bring a lot of money into certain communities and industries, provide good union jobs, and therefore it’s pushed heavily by the unions and the Democrats who are funded by unions. The industries providing the infrastructure will make lots of money. The businesses located near proposed HSR links will make more money. All of these special interests are pushing hard for HSR.
These special interests are smart. They know they’re not going to get money showered on them if they make the argument that HSR should be done just to divert money to special interests. But if it’s ‘green’? Then it’s for the good of the country! So the charade begins.
But this money doesn’t appear out of the ether. It’s taxed out of the rest of the economy. Don’t confuse this with ‘stimulus’. Stimulus is the intentional use of borrowed money to create demand in an economy that is stalled because of a demand decline. HSR funding is not stimulus - the money won’t be spent for years, by which time the economy is forecast to be roaring along again. That money will have to be raised in taxes, and that will offset every job ‘created’.
This is a perfect example of how bad policy is made - the cost of a program is extracted from the economy diffusely, so no one person or group is affected enough to mount a massive campaign against it. The benefits, on the other hand, accrue to defined groups or locations, and they have a HUGE interest in promoting the policy. But no jobs are ‘created’. They’re just suctioned out of the economy writ large and deposited in the hands of the powerful interests. It’s an illusion.
No one is there to speak up for the small grocer who has to fire a boxboy because his taxes went up 5%. No one is there to speak for the auto mechanic laid off because a train subsidy is paid for by gasoline taxes, reducing the number of cars in an area. No one is there to speak for the small business that goes under because HSR has diverted traffic away from his storefront to the store five miles away.
It’s very hard to see the jobs lost through higher general taxes and economic distortions created by the government. It’s very easy to see the jobs ‘created’ by the depositing of that money in a small region. That’s how bad policy propagates.
AFAIK, There were good reasons why Florida refused. As I said before only on few areas one could see this work, California is likely one of them.
And I can only see ideology in your screed and no mention of the reasons why it is more likely the boxboy was fired, because many at the top decided to apply weapons of mass financial destruction to housing and business.
And when the economy is likely roaring along again, it will be the states with better infrastructures that will be better prepared to get more of them.
But I get the feeling in last post that you do sound like the defender of the ferry companies in the San Fransisco bay, all those jobs affected by a silly private and government funded project in San Fransisco.
Okay, we can agree that it’s possible that there are one or two lines that could potentially run at capacity, where the demand is likely to be stable enough to make HSR pay for itself. California might have been one of them, but it’s screwed up political system and high regulations and high cost of business are screwing that. The HSR plan in California has already been scaled back from what was promised, and costs have been skyrocketing. It’s in big trouble, and should probably be killed.
The New York-Washington run is another line that could potentially be made profitable. Maybe. But it suffers from the same problems - labor costs are outrageous and the regulatory snafus very hard to get around. It’s the unions and the big government types on the left that are killing the potential for HSR to be profitable in California and New York.
Wow. I stay focused on the direct economic issue of opportunity cost and the fallacy of job ‘creation’ when the money to ‘create’ jobs is simply extracted from another part of the economy, and you see ‘ideology’ in MY message because I didn’t include a class warfare argument about the rich screwing everyone over. You might want to look in the mirror and see who’s being the ideologue here.
So, if one state has a big energy-sucking train running at half capacity, being subsidized by the taxpayers of that state to the tune of several billions of dollars a year, and the state next door doesn’t have the train but has lower taxes and a good road system, which one has the better infrastructure?
If one state has its freight moving around through the rail network, and the one next door has roads filled with semi trucks and white cargo vans because the freight has been pushed off the rails by the big, half-empty passenger train that loses money, which one has the better infrastructure?
Good infrastructure is about cost efficiency. It’s about providing a good bang for the taxpayer’s buck. It’s about the overall cost of business and transportation being lower than in neighboring states. Just having a big train does not guarantee a good infrastructure. In fact, so far it’s been the opposite.
Oh, come on. That’s a strawman argument. I’ve kept my comments strictly about rail, not infrastructure in general. What, do you think I oppose bridges?
I was concentrating on the your idea that it’s an illusion, just because there are powerful interest involved it does not follow that the benefits or jobs created are an illusion, that there is a HUGE interest in promoting the policy, is a given.
The bridge example is brought because reaching for the “illusion” point was silly. It would mean that public works would never be considered.
