Sweetums wrote:
gbaji wrote:
And as long as you never need to get anywhere other than points A, B, C, etc, then that's a great alternative. But we can't build rails to everywhere, can we? So how do we deal with that?
If the extent of infrastructure planned for high speed and light rail trains were designed solely to replace planes, you'd have a great point. It's not though. It's designed to replace cars and highways.
Quote:
But airplanes are okay, because the government pays not--oh, wait.
I honestly don't know, and don't really feel like looking it up, but since you said this, I assume that you know what percentage of the total cost of Air travel is subsidized by the government compared to say Amtrak, or any given municipal light rail system? Is it even remotely close?
On the assumption that it isn't (you're free to provide data otherwise if you can find it), then doesn't this mean that the government is "investing" in things which aren't profitable? I mean, if you could make money running a train system then private companies would be doing it a lot more often. You know, that whole "greed" and "profit" thing. So doesn't this mean that once again, we're being asked to put our tax dollars into things that will ultimately cost us more money down the line and not less?
Is that really an "investment"? Or is it getting us stuck paying for yet another big government program that we can't get rid of once people become dependent on it? You know. Like social security. Medicare. Numerous welfare systems. Publicly run education systems? I'm all for building things that will actually make financial sense in the long run. But that's not usually what the Dems do. They have a long history of creating programs designed to cost more than they create and to make people dependent on that cost differential. They pay for them by passing the cost onto those who don't benefit from those things, thus meeting their political agenda of equalizing economic outcomes and playing on class warfare to keep the whole thing going.
They don't want things that are cost effective over time. And their party history shows that they consistently create things which cost more than anticipated, and produce less than anticipated, but just happen to have the convenient side effect of turning the percentage of the population who do benefit from those things into loyal Democrat voters. That's what they are really investing our money in, and that's the return they really hope to gain. So it's not exactly surprising that a lot of people don't want to "invest" that way.
Yeah. It's a trap. One we've fallen into enough times in the past to see coming.
Edited, Jan 27th 2011 4:22pm by gbaji