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[quote user="daveklepper"] "Paid for itself" can mean many things, and not necessarily a good six percent return on an investment dollar or franc. It may have avoided expensive land-taking to allow a vast increase in long-distance and internaitonal aircraft traffic. It may have cut highway driving times substantially by reducing congestion and at the same time allowed for a massive increase in total travel. It may have made certain French non-hardware industries more competitive in the world market by making internal communicaton far easier. It may have improved tourism. And there are others that you can think of. The Germans may not have the speed crown but they beat the French in one aspect: There are regularly schedules German Frederal Railways high-speed passenger trains that are NOT shown in the railway public timetable.  They are Lufthansa "flights" feeding airport hubs like Frankfurt with high-speech medium-distance service doing a better job than airplanes could. The USA does have something similar with USAir (and possibly now Continental?) thhrough ticketing with Amtrak via Baltimore-Washington and Newark. [/quote] Paid for itself in accounting terms is simple.  It means that the project generated sufficient revenues to cover its costs.  Getting there requires proper accounting, which means it will pass the audit muster.   Some nuclear power plants in the U.S. are able to generate market competitive power only because they were permitted to securitize some of the capital costs of the plant.  They were allowed to transfer some of the cost to their transmission and distribution systems.  Market competition, which did not exist when the plants were built, was the justification for allowing the transfers.  Accordingly, if one asked the managers of these plants whether they are paying for themselves, they could say yes.  But in doing so they would be responding in the present without taking into consideration the transfers.  The answer depends on how the question is asked and who is responding.    The other benefits that you claim may be worthy of consideration.  However, if the users don't pay for the costs of the project, the taxpayers have to pick up the difference.  As the GAO has pointed out in its audit of high speed rail projects, not a single system has truly covered its fully allocated costs without significant government support. This country has a serious debt problem, as is the case in many European countries.  Most of these countries, as well as the U.S., have developed these debt problems because of fuzzy economic and financial premises.
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