Posted on 10/27/2010 11:10:25 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
With a lagging economy, high unemployment, and aging transportation systems, Americans debate the best ways to invest in their infrastructure and stimulate economic activity – from high-speed rail and congestion pricing, to cutting pork and tapping private capital.
High-speed rail is a big part of the answer
During the Great Depression, businesses and governments agreed that transportation modernization was essential to restoring prosperity. The 1930s saw the emergence of the freeway (the first one opening in Los Angeles in 1940) and the airport as important modes of transportation. Together with the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956, these Depression Era investments helped produce the long postwar economic boom and brought widespread prosperity to the United States.
As we face another dire economic crisis, we have a similar need for modernization and economic recovery. When gas prices soared in 2008, it helped push the unstable economy over the edge. Even in the depths of the worst recession in 60 years, gas prices remain at 2006 levels. Analysts such as those at Deutsche Bank predict that oil prices will rise again once job growth returns, threatening to strangle a recovery in its infancy.
High-speed rail will not only stimulate the economy during construction, but it will reduce our dependence on foreign oil, helping our economy to avoid future oil price shocks. It will also tie together the economies of mid-sized urban areas to the economies of large metropolitan cities through increased accessibility.
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
Yup. I agree completely.
All of the suggestions, and they are splendid, do not take in to account that we will be a petro-based world for at least the next 150 years, for which there are more than adequate supplies.
Actually, that's not correct; they do, but I don't address that specifically here. Most of what I was writing about in this excerpt is addressing congestion induced by unnecessary trips, which is far more expensive than fuel consumption, particularly where real estate costs are high. The point was to get people thinking about multidisciplinary approaches to problems through libertarian principles, to show that they can and do work.
IMHO, the biggest macro-economic calamity to hit the Western World is the phenomenon of the two-income family.
The purpose of which was to have the government raising the kids, a communist goal which would have horrified America only forty years ago.
Tax policy? It is against the two-income family already.
It's against families period.
Robert Poole's solutions don't exactly strike me as left-wing. However, it has been said that the Reason Foundation is a corporate front for international toll road companies.
And I thought it was called the Houston Comical.
But even accounting for those factors, something like 60% of fossil fuels are consumed by transportation and 60% of transportation is commuting to work and school. So eliminate even 40% of the commuting and you've eliminated, or at least postponed, the need for new roads, new sources of fossil fuel and all the problems attendant thereto.
The biggest barrier to such an outcome is, of course, government. Fewer people moving about mean fewer sources of revenue from gas taxes and payroll taxes because, face it, many jobs depend on the need for people to be constantly moving about and support the transportation infrastructure which bleeds much of that income off these same people.
Better batteries charged by nuclear power.
The Carbuncle (a pus filled boil) is better when looking a the foul opinions they publish instead of news.
Either way, they lost another 10% of readership this year alone. Good riddance !
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