It's too bad that in the current political climate our passenger railroads are not still run by private corporations. Do you see where we're going with this.
If Amtrak were a private corporation, all it would have to do - other than pay its executives scads of money to run it into the ground - would be to whine about how it is too big and important to the United States economy to fail. Bingo. The government would be buying up equity with taxpayer dollars and there would no longer be a question of getting appropriations in Congress.
With Congress ready to pour money into 1. banks; 2. insurance companies; and 3. anything else that moves and has assets to control, the freight railroads are already lining up at the door to the treasury. (We once had an uncle who used to do what Congress does to number 3, but we called it something different.)
It may bode well for rail infrastructure, but again we fall back on the questions: How far can government money go? How is all this going to happen without huge tax increases? If we are all out of a job, how are we going to pay taxes?
Neither candidate for president seems to have these answers.
We spend a lot of time worrying these days.
©2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com
1 comment:
Well, don't forget that Amtrak exists essentially because the entire railroad industry (and Penn Central) was too big to fail. Passenger trains were the most visible problem, so they were removed as a financial burden. That didn't work and Penn Central and others were still too big to fail and we got Conrail. That's lifted up as a success, but it got that way by scrapping a lot of lines and driving away a lot of customers.
Frankly, I think the history of the railroad industry offers lessons for the current crisis. Frankly, I think we're in the "Amtrak phase" right now. They'll be a "Conrail phase" that will be more successful, but in the meantime we're going to get a legacy of unproductive government involvement in banking - and maybe GM too.
We needed an Amtrak in 1971, but it was never given the resources and freedom to be a success. I'm afraid the same thing is happening now. Five things made Conrail work: the groundwork laid by USRA (in contrast to Amtrak which was planned hastily and with too much politics); Lots of government investment in the seventies (Amtrak got some investment but never enough to catch up); Superior leadership by Stanley Crane and others (Amtrak had Graham Claytor, but otherwise has suffered); the righting of the balance of power with labor (Conrail shook off the original 6 years of job protection while labor still calls the shots in many ways on capital hill, with operations and to protect poorly performing employees); and the Staggers Act which gave Conrail competitive advantages and liberated it from regulatory strangulation (Amtrak also got freedom from regulation and has benefited from it.)
With Conrail most of the problems ailing it were fixed or abandoned. We haven't begun fixing the problems of the economy.
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