This is good news, but we still have the idiotic habit of using airplanes for mid-distance travel, due to the lack of a decent train system.
Both of my parents have been railroad engineers all their lifes, and the main thing I learned was this: railroads are not economical at transporting passengers. Nearly all countries with "decent train systems" use government subsidies to effectively sponsor passenger railroad transport. Even subways can't make any profit.
And I am against paying more taxes. Period. Therefore, no government subsidies to Amtrak from me.
The problem with the train system now is that it's dilapidated, expensive, and slow, which leads to low use, leading to disrepair... and so on. However, air travel is going that way right now, and something will fill the void. Trains at 80 mph are not competitive with airlines, but maglev trains are capable of 250+.
Paying high taxes to support tax cuts for the rich?
I'm okay with paying higher taxes if I'm getting something for it-- cheap transportation
You do realize that "paying for something to make it cheap" just changes who pays for something, yes? Like...I'm in favor of YOU buying ME a nice present, like cheap transportation. At gunpoint.
Basic stuff.
A train passes by my office occasionally. I don't think it is subsidized. It carries coal. Now...if it was practical for that train to carry people, it would do so, without subsidies. It's not like government is actually needed to make trains profitable.
Apart from SS, the "rich" pay the vast majority of income taxes in the US. That's not to say that all of the rich people pay taxes - there's a lot of folks who buy Munis and the like for tax avoidance (supposedly reducing the costs of various govt projects) and then there are the folks who have managed their estates so they'll never be taxed (including Warren "the inheritance tax should be higher" Buffet).
Yes - it's reasonable to exclude SS. SS is essentially a bad forced savings account. However, SS is progressive in that the less you contributed, the better your return. For folks who pay the max, it's a horrible deal. Both "contributions" and benefits are capped so Perot doesn't get $1M/month.
The rich pay a lower fraction of their income in consumption taxes than the poor, but that's because they consume a smaller fraction of their income and they don't consume as much "sin". (Most consumption taxes exempt food, which is a larger fraction of poor people's income, but poor people also spend more of their money on tobacco and alcohol.)
time_management: "It's paying high taxes to support Bush's war and tax cuts for the rich that I have a problem with."
mynameishere: "Paying high taxes to support tax cuts for the rich?"
Hexstream: "If the rich pay less taxes then the non-rich probably pay more..."
I meant that if the rich get new tax cuts, thus paying less taxes, and the government wants the same amount of taxes overall, then the non-rich necessarily have to pay more to compensate the loss incurred.
Private transportation is subsidized just as much as public transportation if you factor in the cost of all those eight lane interstates. It's all a matter of priorities.
I'm not saying that rail travel is a better solution... I'm just pointing out that no matter what way we go about it, the government will spend significant amounts of money. The Federal Budget allotted $67 billion for transportation improvement projects this year.[1] Add to that a huge amount spent by the states and local jurisdictions (I know my state roughly matches it's Federal grants with it's own money.) Contrast this with Europe, which spent 125 billion euros on road projects, and 73 billion on rail subsidies, and has three times as many people.[2]
You can't end a debate on rail travel by saying it's not profitable without subsidies. Roads would not happen without massive government subsidies either. Witness the need for the Eisenhower Interstate project to kickstart decent long distance highways in the 1950s.
Air travel benefits from the same things. If airlines had to build their own airports, ticket prices would be much higher. The airlines benefit from billions of dollars spent annually by states and municipalities to build nice airports, add runways, and run air traffic control.
All that comes out of your taxes too.
[1] http://www.dot.gov/affairs/dot1507.htm
[2] http://reports.eea.europa.eu/technical_report_2007_3/en/eea_...
Don't say "just as much". People buy their own cars, perform their own maintenance, pay their own insurance, and essentially pay a subscription through gas taxes (which, in my opinion, should fund 100 percent of roadwork.)
Sidenote - the MTA in NYC is only 5% paid for by the city, with 95% of its operating budget coming from rider fairs. There is a big complaint from subway riders that it isn't more, the subways make the city possible, shouldn't they pay more into it?
And your "gas tax should fund highways" idea is laughable. Look at the numbers (there were some posted at matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com in the past few weeks). The gas tax doesn't even cover maintenance of existing road systems, much less all the new construction that we are constantly doing. And remember that it's not just the roads themselves, but all the extra costs involved in forcing society to do all that driving. Cost of delivery of goods to residential areas, for example, is much higher in the US than western europe because of all the trucks needed.
Uh, you have to compare it with the amount of people it moves. Not the absolute amount. If taxes pay for trains, upkeep, insurance, salaries for drivers, as well as the infrastructure, then that is a greater tax burden than just the highways, PER USAGE. I considered explaining that in my post, but I figured that math savvy hackers wouldn't need it. I figured wrong.
And your "gas tax should fund highways" idea is laughable.
Oh? Please...explain why.
The gas tax doesn't even cover maintenance of existing road systems,
Oh, I see. Well, if you re-read my sentence I said "SHOULD" fund highways. "Should"
SHOULD: A word meaning, "ought", as in, you "should" parse and process each sentence properly before commenting on it. You "should" look up any words you don't fully understand. That sort of thing.
See, I figured that a bunch of well-educated hackers could understand basic language concepts. I figured wrong.
That is surprising. Source? Also, does your source explain why someone would want to know the subsidy per person, mile, $ of GDP, etc., instead of the percentage of spending accounted for by subsidies versus other activities? It seems that the latter measures what you would actually care about -- e.g. the government probably spends more money on retirement (through Social Security) than it does on space flight. But the government spends a higher fraction of the total money spent on space flight than on retirement, so one would argue that space flight is more subsidized.
The marginal road might not be profitable, but some roads would be built without subsidies. The earliest highways in America were funded by private businessmen who thought it would be profitable to connect the towns that they lived in. Private roads have a long and successful history, even if in modern times they have been crowded out of the market by trillions of dollars of federal and state projects.
One of the four great intercontinental railroads was built entirely without government grants or subsidies. If I recall correctly, it also lasted the longest.
When I criticize the government or question the need for its existence, people often respond with "Oh yeah, how would you get around without roads? The government provides all our transportation. That's useful.". However, the argument is a straw man, historically ignorant, and blinded by the status quo. Too often people are so constrained by how things are that they can not think about how they were different in the past or how they could be in the future.
Which one? From what I've read they all got the government to make eminent domain seizures for them (so even if this one railroad paid for the land it got, it still had a government subsidy in the form of a strongarm).
Back to the topic, what I was trying to point out is that it's silly to expect unsubsidized private railways to compete with massively subsidized road/air transport and still be profitable. It's hypocritical to always expect rail to bootstrap itself while giving such massive assistance to road/air, then claim that it's somehow rail's fault when it cannot compete.
(~3 trillion miles / year) / (~300billion / year) = 10c/mile or around 3$ per gallon of gas.
Amtrak = $210.31 per passenger per 1,000 miles = 21c/mile but there are significant network effects so some routs are far more subsidized than others.
And with such a long history of investments in cars and roads it's hard to calculate what's the better long term value.
And can you imagine the traffic in New York, Paris or London if the "unprofitable" subway networks were shut down? Society has a huge interest in keeping these networks running, even if it's impossible for a private company to start a new railroad and turn a profit.
There are a lot of variables involved here. Don't be too sure you see the whole picture.
The amount of transportation produced in the free market would be equal to the amount that people were willing to pay for, and that seems fair to me. Producing roads that people aren't willing to voluntarily pay for is a social loss. The people paying for the roads would rather use their money for other things. We are taking their consumption away from more highly valued goods and putting it towards lesser valued goods.
I like free markets too, but whenever there's something like the Tragedy of the Commons or Moral Hazard involved, free markets lose much of their advantages.
Some things really do benefit the whole herd and and everyone needs to contribute whether they like it or not. I'm all for minimal government where the free market works, but it's not the right solution to every problem.
Profit can't be the only motive for doing things, some things must be done because it's simply the right thing to do and profiting off of it just wouldn't be right.
Society might not be required to feed and cloth you, but it should damn sure protect you from other members of society, and it should step in and do things to prevent the free market from damaging the one world we all have to share, like decent public transportation to reduce the need for everyone to drive and continually pollute the environment.
Pure libertarianism focuses too much on individual rights without acknowledging the reality that we aren't born into such a world, we're social animals and we're born into large societies that we're forced to conform to which in may ways benefits us all, but hurts us as well.
No one gets rich or wealthy alone, they get it from society and that can't be a one way street. Those people who have money to spend on roads only have it because of society, like it or not, the owe society something back for that.
Libertarians believe government doesn't work so the less there is the better, and this is mostly correct; big government doesn't work and can't because there is no one set of rules that all people will ever agree too, but local government, say city level, must work because the only alternative is lawlessness. That being the case, ridding ourselves of federal influence would allow us to segregate into like minded communities where rules can be established that all agree to. Some cities might want prayer in school, others might not, some want everyone to carry a gone while others want to outlaw guns, and that's as it should be, live and let live by recognizing that 300 million people won't ever agree so don't force them to.
The flaw in our society is not government, it's how big and non local we've let it become.
Chart and link to more info here: http://www.streetsblog.org/2008/07/22/highway-funding-the-la...
Hmm, what's better: fly, together with a bunch of people, or drive all by yourself?
Anyway, you'll see a lot of airlines go bust this coming year - unless they start offering on-time guarantees.
I was stuck on the tarmac at Amsterdam's airport for 8 hours and got a EUR 50 voucher from Northwest Airlines toward a future ticket (yeah, right). I tore it up in front of the woman, and told her that anything less than a free ticket was an insult. This was in 2003, and if airlines weren't going to offer on-time guarantees then, they certainly won't do so now.
Frankly, I don't think it's high oil that is hurting the airlines, because they can (and almost certainly do) hedge against this by buying oil futures. I think the collapse of demand for first-class and last-minute seats is hurting them. The fussy rich people who used to demand 1st class, and were willing to pay 4x the regular price for 50% more space, now prefer to fly chartered or private planes. If you have a pilot's license, taking a family of four in a small plane is comparable in cost to 1st-class commercial. Also, the growth of videoconferencing is causing a massive decline in short-notice business travel, formerly a source of demand for overpriced late tickets.
Really? I think that airline travel was actually at an all-time high in the USA in 2007:
http://www.bts.gov/programs/airline_information/air_carrier_...
Example: there is a train from Los Angeles Union Station to San Diego. But how can one go to LA Union Station? From Santa Monica, Venice Beach, West LA, Pacific Palisades, etc. it's just plan impossible. The Metro bus is a joke: it takes over an hour, and likely you need a previous bus with added waiting times in between (and buses are unreliable because they have no exclusive lanes to avoid heavy traffic). A taxi is very expensive ($60+). You need a friend to drive you there. And once in San Diego the situation repeats itself.
Same situation, but a bit less bad, in the East Coast: nice trains from Washington DC to NY and Boston. While Boston and NY have very decent local transport systems, Washington's doesn't really go anywhere. Again one is stuck with $60+ taxis to go anywhere.