Speaking in Indiana last week, Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood said Amtrak’s success shows that American should build high-speed rail. “Amtrak is doing very well,” claimed LaHood. “They’re making money, that wasn’t true a few years ago.”
This led BoydGroup, an aviation consulting firm, to say, “This guy is lost in space.” BoydGroup points out that Amtrak lost $1.4 billion in 2010, which is actually underreported because Amtrak counts state subsidies as “revenues.”
Wisconsin’s Governor Walker is losing the public-relations battle to the public-employee unions whose power he is challenging. Whenever I see this issue discussed on the news, people on Walker’s side are quoted saying the state has to cut costs or it will go broke, while people on the unions’ side say they are willing to make salary and pension concessions, they just don’t want to lose the right to collective bargaining. To the average American, Walker is a meanie trying to deny downtrodden public employees their rights.
There is a very good reason why public employees should not have the right to collective bargaining. In the private sector, companies may consist of thousands of stockholders and thousands of workers. It is obviously impossible for each stockholder to bargain with each worker. The stockholders hire managers to represent their interests, so it seems only fair that workers have unions to represent their interests. Both sides can bargain effectively based on their conflicting interest (each wants as big a share of the revenues as possible) and shared interest (each wants the company to continue).
This symmetry doesn’t exist in the public sector. On one side are the taxpayers whose money pays public employees, while on the other side are the employees. But elected or appointed officials who would bargain on behalf of the state don’t represent taxpayers; they represent voters. And if a large segment of those voters are public employees, and if their unions make large contributions to political campaigns, then the state officials are likely to make concessions that taxpayers won’t want or can’t afford to pay.
The 2008 financial crisis has proven to be a bonanza for at least one industry: Book publishers have issued dozens of tomes about what went wrong and how to fix it. Lately, the Antiplanner has been reading as many of these as possible.
Most of the authors have an axe to grind and many blame the crisis on one chief player: the Federal Reserve, private bankers, the mortgage industry, bond rating companies, politicians trying to increase homeownership, etc. Of course, loyal Antiplanner readers know the real culprit was growth-management planning, a thesis few of the book writers recognize–the main exception being Thomas Sowell in The Housing Boom and Bust.
In reading the other books, my goal has been to sift out the overblown rhetoric about greed and malice to find as many useful facts and insights as possible. Here are a few of the more interesting points.
Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood proudly announced Saturday that the BNSF Railway has agreed to increase Portland-Seattle train speeds from their current average of 53.4 mph to 56.1 mph, saving just 10 minutes (3 hours 30 minutes reduced to 3 hours 20 minutes) over the 187-mile trip. This, said LaHood, is “part of the President’s long-term vision to give 80% of Americans access to high-speed rail in the next 25 years.”
Amtrak Cascades with Mt. Rainier in the background. Photo courtesy Washington State Department of Transportation.
And it is costing taxpayers a mere $590 million. But wait–there’s more! You not only get a speed boost of 2.7 mph, you get two new daily round trips, increasing the number from 5 to 7. How can you top this deal?
In 2007, an American scholar teaching in Christchurch uncovered a public-land scandal: New Zealand was giving grazing lands to local farmers at prices that were well below market. In fact, the government often paid farmers to take land that they sometimes turned around and sold at a huge profit.
The scholar was Ann Brower, who as it happens had audited the Antiplanner’s courses in incentive-based conservation at both Yale (where she was a masters student) and Berkeley (where she was a Ph.D. candidate). We even shared an office for at least one semester at Berkeley.
After getting her Ph.D., Ann received a Fulbright scholarship to study in New Zealand, where Lincoln University in Christchurch offered her a teaching position. Her current title is “senior lecturer,” which I believe is roughly equivalent to associate professor in the U.S.
Some people have noticed that some of the comments people made on Wednesday’s post are missing. Apparently, the server went down and my ISP lost the last dozen or so comments. It also lost this morning’s post. It is more commonly seen in middle-aged men Leading to ED Some common causes of impotence for both men and buy viagra without rx ladies. Many men feel extremely embarrassed and shy to discuss with the close ones, friend or even to consult with a doctor. cost viagra online This is not only related to hyperthyroidism in cats symptoms since there are many cats with some other health tadalafil online pharmacy problems that have been successfully addressed by Hypnotherapist. Statistics show increased prevalence of the condition in men aged between 40 to 79 years. 17% it is mild, re-occurring, annoying pain that comes and goes (mostly due to lack viagra generika regencygrandenursing.com of activity and poor sitting posture) but in some people the pain can be so severe that it can completely prevent them moving or completing any of their activities of daily living.
I was able to recreate this morning’s post, but not the comments. Feel free to remake the comments if you like.
When Wisconsin and Ohio elected governors who promised to cancel high-speed rail, Secretary LaHood took their money away before the governors-elect even took office. But when Florida’s governor cancelled that state’s high-speed rail, LaHood gave local governments a week to see if they could form a consortium able to take on the project.
Why didn’t LaHood make the same offer to cities in Wisconsin and Ohio? I am sure there are enough rail advocates in Madison and Milwaukee that it was at least worth considering.
Maryland’s Intercounty Connector opens for traffic today, either one day or 41 years late depending on how you count. The toll road connects Montgomery and Prince George County in the suburbs of Washington, DC, an area that has grown by more than 75 percent since the road was first planned in the 1960s.
Click to download a larger map.
Although only 7.2 miles of the six-lane road opens for traffic today, the full 18.8 miles will open in 2012. At a total cost of $2.6 billion, the road costs an average of about $23 million per mile, which is typical of some urban roads but high for a rural road. About $350 million of the total cost was for environmental mitigation and enhancement.
“Hands-free driving. Cars that park themselves. An unmanned car driven by a search engine company. We’ve seen that movie. It ends with robots harvesting our bodies for energy.”
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True freedom is not having to have your hands on the wheel at all times.
The debates over public employee pension benefits in Wisconsin and high-speed rail are, at heart, the same question: what to do about growing government debt? There seem to be four basic views.
On the Democratic side are the Krugmanites, who think we need to stop worrying about deficits and spend, Spend, SPEND our way out of the recession. While the 2009 stimulus bill preserved some government jobs, it did little to stimulate the rest of the economy, and Megan McArdle reasonably asks if, possibly, Keynesian economics, even if valid in theory, is just not practical because no country can afford the prescription.
