Obama Shames America by Coveting China’s Trains and Airports
[BigGovernment.com]
Posted Sep 16th 2011 at 10:11 am
An oft-repeated talking point and applause line has crept into President Obama’s repertoire of class-envy and demonizing rhetoric these days.
“At a time when countries like China are building high-speed rail lines and gleaming new airports, we’ve got over a million unemployed construction workers — many of them Latino — who could be doing the same thing right here in the United States. That’s not right. It’s time for us to fix it.”
Setting aside the ethnic pandering inserted especially for the Hispanic Caucus audience, the blatant coveting of China’s shiny new toys is shameful.
About China’s high-speed rail edge…
HotAir.com
Barack Obama has spent the past two years scolding Americans on our lack of progress on high-speed rail, using China as a yardstick — or more appropriately, a ruler with which to rap our knuckles. Almost exactly two years ago, Obama announced his intention to spend tens of billions of dollars in catching up to China and Europe in subsidizing the rail lines and systems for high-speed transport. “My high-speed rail proposal will lead to innovations that change the way we travel in America,” Obama said in April 2009, saying of China that it “may have more miles of high-speed rail service than any other country just five years from now.”
High-Speed Rail and the Poverty of Obamanomics
BigGovernment.com
Posted Feb 17th 2011 at 4:37 am
Hard on the heels of his speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in which he jawboned the owners of private businesses to increase hiring in return for federal tax breaks and other subsidies, President Obama has included in his budget request for fiscal year 2012 a proposal to make a $8 billion down payment on a six-year, $53 billion taxpayer-financed “investment” in high-speed rail.
The president’s budget proposal is a bad idea for at least two reasons. First and foremost, the public sector has little or no incentive to spend the taxpayers’ money in ways that maximize the ratio of benefits to costs. What is more important, no public transit system in the country, with the possible exception of New York City’s subway, generates passenger revenues sufficient to cover operating costs, let alone capital costs. All others gush red ink year after year.
Passenger fares on public transit modes typically are set at rates below full cost in order to maximize ridership and to “prove” that transportation via bus or rail is a worthy public service.
It may be reasonable to assume that high-speed rail transportation in the Northeast corridor, linking Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York and Boston, could pay its own way, but that conclusion depends on the relative cost of rail versus air and automobile travel among those same cities.
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