http://www.examiner.com/news-in-national/biden-announces-billion-dollar-budget-for-high-speed-rail
Control Schooling.........................X
Control Financial Services...........X
Control Healthcare.......................X
Y not? Control Transportation.....X
""There are key places where we cannot afford to sacrifice as a nation—one of which is infrastructure," said Biden"
translation:
Only government could pull off such stupidity and stay in business.
On CSPAN this morning they had some Democratic congress-critter telling us how the government needs to spend money on infrastructure. He said that this spending (hundreds of billions worth) would “get people back to work.” Congress just spent billions on infrastructure with the stimulus package in 2009 – supposedly to “create jobs,” but with no results to speak of. Now they’re back at it, with the same rhetoric!
It is truly a testament to the extraordinary ridiculousness of democracy that not only do these people become “leaders,” but rise to the top and become expropriators-in-chief.
One of the reasons the French government has never stopped harassing Ryanair is because the Irish company has always posed a formidable threat to one of their pet project: high speed railways. Ryanair tickets are considerably cheaper and, even when the riduculous regulation forcing people to arrive an hour or more in advance are taken into account, airplanes are just much faster than trains will ever be. They even went as far as not giving Ryanair permission to fly routes more or less competing with their high speed trains, like Paris-Nice.
Letìs consider the two countries which embraced more enthusiastically the idea of high speed trains: France and Japan. Two of the most interventionist countries in the world. The need of mobility would have been better served by regional airliners but even such a large enterprise as building an airport pales when compared with building even a single high speed railroad. Think of Hoover Dam on a larger scale, only without the added bonus of providing electricity.
Considering the distances in the US high speed trains make even less sense than in France. There's also the problem of power: a single TGV swallows the whole output of a middle-sized power plant. Correct me if I am wrong but I think some areas of the US (California?) already experience brown-outs during the Summer months due to insufficient supply. In short is a make-work idea so idiotic even Stalin or Mao would have turned it down. High speed trains are not "vital infrastructures": they are toys. No, they are worse than toys because they put such a drain on funding that other more urgent infrastructural projects have to be put on the backburner. If the Obama Administration really wants to implement a make-work project why don't they hire a bunch of people to dig a hole in the middle of nowhere? It would be cheaper and less annoying.
Hey, at least they aren't literally digging, then backfilling holes.
This would be such an enormous undertaking cost-wise I think. The Fed'll buy the paper to pull it off so why not? Maybe the sheer number of people it'll employ will finally spark some "money velocity" so the deflationists can stop bullshitting. Actually, I'd wager this project is never seen to completion, I'm not sure how much longer the US bond market can go before it cracks.
I have also puzzled about the distance problem, Germany is a small country and the rail system is not cheap nor are the rail companies exactly booming either. China and USA vast in comparison, yet not a single politician sees this simple fact. In China the citizens obviously have not much say on where the money goes, those flashy high speed rails look good on propaganda videos, but whats the point of covering vast distances when there is no need to, China may be growing but I doubt that they have a booming domestic tourist industry or hoards of businessmen that need to travel those distances every day.
The Chinese governments is having LOTS of second thoughts about high speed railways. Tickets are projected to be so expensive as to make them unpalatable to travellers accustomed to cheap tickets for ordinary trains. Ordinary Chinese don't mind the journey taking longer as long as the ride is cheap. People in a hurry and with financial means will just buy a plane ticket: China is a huge country and airplanes are just faster. China built many airports in the past twenty years, most of them underused, providing a vast network for air travellers.
Also the projected network will require an enormous mass of travellers just to break even: there may literally be not enough travellers to go around!
But we may argue that China can afford having such toys as high speed trains. Their economy is surely in a much better state than any Western country's and once they'll learn some lessons from the present housing bubble will probably be even better off. Wealthy people can afford expensive hobbies.
Europe has been more or less forced by France to accept high speed trains. There's no real need them and tickets are expensive. Improving existing freight lines (most of them completely insufficient) would be cheaper and much more useful. Their main raison d'etre is to provide huge make-work projects: building high-speed railways is a colossal endeavor, requiring tens of thousand people working for years. All big names can have their slice: labor unions, steel mills, building concerns... down to the people installing signs along the rail lines. The Socialist influence which is more or less embedded in the French political DNA was the original driving force behind this. France had a booming aircraft industry at the time the first TGV was unveiled (Sud-Est, Dassault, Breguet, Morane-Saulnier etc) and had always been in the forefront of aviation research: there was no need for such a thing to provide fast transportation. It was an exclusively political-driven project, the fruit of Socialist pipe-dreams mating with the resurgent Gallic chauvinism championed by such figures as Charles De Gaulle at a moment when France was struggling to deal with having being dealt crippling defeats by "peasants" in both Algeria and Indochina and with the uneasiness of Germany growing more prosperous and powerful by the day.
I wish I could understand these people's fascination with trains. Someone on another forum wrote: "it's greener, promotes physical connectivity, bolsters the infrastructure, increases road safety, decreases inflation, and provides many jobs." That's right - trains fight inflation! Milton Friedman was way off.