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RXR Anti Trust Exemptions. Is it a problem?
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[quote]QUOTE: <i>Originally posted by PNWRMNM</i> <br />...In contrast the government in this same period set about subsidizing the railroads' motor and water carrier competitors... <br /> <br />[/quote] <br /> <br />And just where did those "subsidies" come from? User fees. Ergo, they are not subsidies, they are pay as you go expenditures. <br /> <br />You cannot include property tax expenditures for county and city streets, those are service oriented expenditures, not commerce oriented expenditures. Nor can you include the States' share of non-user fee expenditures for commerce related highways, since that is up to the discretion of each state's legislatures, not the federal government. <br /> <br />In a more gray area, most of the "subsidies" for water carriers are actually expenditures required to maintain navigatability of previously navigatable rivers that have been dammed for energy, irrigation, and/or flood control. You can argue that the resulting slack water from such projects allows greater load factors than had existed prior to such projects, but you also cannot expect a navigation maintenance project to purposefully minimize the load factor for water carriers. It should also be pointed out that railroads are the recipients of the same "subsidy" if a rail line needs to be relocated for a water project. The only difference in that vein is that the railroads must resume maintenance of those relocated tracks once the relocation project is done, while the water carriers pay for channel maintenance via the Waterways Trust Fund. <br /> <br />On the whole, the only real advantage of highway users and water carriers is that the railroads must pay property taxes on their ROW. This property hold is entirely the result of the railroad's choice, and anytime they want to turn their ROW over to a public entity, I'm sure they could do so. Since they choose to keep it private, the property tax argument is also moot. <br /> <br />Since the railroads have held onto proprietary ownership of ROW rather than allowing public ownership in the same vein as highways and waterways, their complaints of "subsidies" for the ROW's of the other modes is specious argument not worthy of credibility or empathy.
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