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Ed, You're making a huge mistake in taking "general" inflation-adjusted rail rates and assuming that 45% reduction applies to both captive shippers and non-captive shippers. I have no doubt the rates for importers have fallen in real terms more than 45%. What you need to find out is not the "real" rates for captive shippers (which I doubt have gone down 45%), but the COMPARATIVE rates of captive shippers to non-captive shippers. Say that hypothetically the inflation adjusted rates for captive shippers have actually gone down 25%. The railroads say "See, your rates are going down, you have nothing to complain about." The captive shipper replies "So what if my rates have gone down 25%, the rates for my competitors have gone down twice that much. It does me no good to get a rate reduction if the rates of my competitors have gone down twice as much, because now they have increased their advantage over me, and as such I am in a worse place than before when I was paying higher real rates." In other words, you're focussing on the wrong numbers. The real numbers to be concerned about is that captive shippers (e.g. domestic producers) are paying rates as high as 235%* of the railroad's variable costs, while non-captive shippers (e.g. Chinese importers) are paying rates that are about 106% of the railroad's variable costs. *(I'm going by memory here, so the 235% number may vary) If you are a shipper, it does you absolutely no good to get a token discount if your competitor is getting a huge discount. Compared to your competitor, you have actually accrued a net loss in relative terms. And in global terms, U.S. producers have acrued a net loss in rail rates compared to overseas producers since the passage of Staggers. That's the hard cold fact you have to contemplate.
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