Edit post

Edit your reply below.

Post Body
Enter your post below.
[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by oltmannd ...as for FM, now I see that some kinds of subsidies are better than others? Operating subsidies are veboten, but hidden ones are OK, I suppose. If I have to spend $100/month on mortgage (capital) and $100/month on groceries (operations), and I only earn $100/month, I'd would be OK to subsidize my mortgage but not my groceries? What's the difference? $100 is $100! [/quote] Don, The analogy is a bit off. What the feds do is to support highways, waterways, and airports. e.g. infrastructure through user fees and state/local discretionary spending, with additional moneys often coming from economic development grants and the like. What this does is to allow access by multiple service providers, mostly private, so that users of these pathways have options for transport. What the feds DONT do is to directly fund transporter services, which is why Amtrak has been such an anomoly of federal spending protocols. No AmAir, no AmShip, no AmBus, etc, but plenty of JFK's and I-5's. Infrastructure historically does not do well under private ownership, thus the need for public funding, whereas service providers can and do do well as private entities competing with each other and via this competition improve the level of their services. In this vein, the U.S. rail network is kind of a freak of nature, and because of this private ROW ownership we have had rail retrenchment going on for nearly a century. Conversely, there has been no retrenchment of any highways, waterways, or airports that I know of. I expect if other transportation ROW's were privately owned we also would have seen closures in those areas of infrastructure. What the Bush Administration is doing (I hope) is to take the feds out of the business of hauling people and instead engage in the practice of infrastructure upkeep whereby other service providers can utilize said infrastructure for the purpose of hauling the things Amtrak used to haul. With the current proprietary rail grid this is obviously difficult to do outside the NEC, so the next best thing is to maintain the rights of access currently used by Amtrak and hopefully transfer that right of access to state, regional, and private rail service providers, albeit limited to passenger services for the time being. I expect the Class I's will try and eliminate this access right if Amtrak transporting services are discontinued, so that is where the next big fight will occur.
Tags (Optional)
Tags are keywords that get attached to your post. They are used to categorize your submission and make it easier to search for. To add tags to your post type a tag into the box below and click the "Add Tag" button.
Add Tag