Posted on 01/03/2018 9:46:27 AM PST by MNDude
It's rare for a president to pull funding from a sweetheart transportation project. But on the final Friday of 2017, the Trump administration announced that it was backing away from an Obama-era plan to lavish billions in federal aid on the Hudson Tunnel project.
Billed as "the nation's most urgent major infrastructure project" by its proponents, the venture envisions a new rail tunnel beneath the Hudson River along with repairs to an existing rail tunnel damaged by Hurricane Sandy. All of this would mostly serve to increase rail transit service within the New York City metro area.
Given the huge price tag—a projected $13 billion—the state governments of New York and New Jersey have spent years trying to shift as much of the financial burden as possible onto federal taxpayers. They temporarily succeeded in 2015, when the Obama administration made a non-binding public commitment to fund half the project.
(Excerpt) Read more at reason.com ...
Hey!
The Mob isn’t going like being taken off of the gravy train!
AND FIND OUT WHERE THE $4 TRILLION ‘STIMULUS’ FUNDING WENT
Good, and while we’re at it, can we get downstate NYS to spin off and leave us upstaters alone?
Kind of surprising considering he is a New Yorker and a lot of his business is there.
Shows he really is trying to do what is best for the country.
I think the federal government (i.e. U.S. taxpayers) should help them with the legitimate costs of repairing the damaged tunnel, as part of disaster relief, but they should be told that if they want to construct an additional tunnel they need to fund it themselves.
Has Boston’s ‘big dig’ stopped sucking federal dollars yet?
They did not and do not support him; what else should they expect?
So the Kenyan spoofed New Yorkers. LOL
He was their guy. Embrace reality folks.
$10 Trillion and counting. The original stimulus package was $1.2 Trillion but that “one time” money was allowed to remain in every budget since then.
Not surprising. He’ll never get the electoral votes from those communist states anyways.
LOL
Cut the rail project. Then states need to refund all state tax dollars to the people of those states involved to help cover not being able to deduct state taxes off of ones federal taxes. End the scam now.
Tell it the way it is Trump!
Bravo.
Obama really was good at sending taxpayer monies to Lib States, wan’t he?
Aren’t NYS and NJ losing domestic population?
Those tunnels serve about 100,000 people on a typical weekday. That's a ridiculously small number for a $13 billion project when you consider that 8 million people live in New York City and nearly 9 million people live in New Jersey on the other side of the Hudson River. So those 100,000 people represent about 0.6% of the population who could potentially ride those trains.
Of course the state governments in New York and New Jersey are looking to push off the cost of the new tunnels on the Federal government. Not only do the states not have the money to do the project themselves ... they also have no political will to do the project even if you handed them $13 billion and told them to spend it on their most important infrastructure projects.
Putting another bargaining chip on the table-—or off the table as you might think.
At some point, federal action and decision-making, based now upon Trump’s good instincts and business sense, as here, need to be followed up with actual constitutional rationale for federal action.
I see no constitutional authority for the feds to fund state projects.
THE CONSTITUTION - at some point the Constitution must be the only justifier of ANY federal action since the Constitution is the only legal basis of the feds existence and power
And cut off the fed funding for the Grey Davis CA train from Button Willow to Bakersfield or somewhere in the desert.
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