High-Speed Rail Is Out of the Budget
Early Tuesday morning, Congressional leaders agreed on a 2011 budget package that zeros out funding for high-speed rail and rescinds $400 million in 2010 funding that remains unspent (transportation begins on p. 404). The package has the support of Senate Majority Leader Reid, House Speaker Boehner, and House Appropriations Committee Chair Hal Rogers. The budget […]
Dead or Not, States Want High-Speed Rail Money
High-speed rail may be dead, but numerous states would be happy to get some of Florida’s $2.4 billion in rejected high-speed rail funds. Yesterday was the deadline for applications for this money, and some of the applicants include: California, of course, would like it all, even though that would still leave it $50 billion or […]
Portland: Second-Most Miserable City?
The Wall Street Journal has published a “misery index” that ranks Portland as the nation’s second-most miserable city after Phoenix. Or, at least, the second-most miserable of the 20 cities included in the ranking. The newspaper’s index is supposed to be based on changes in unemployment, housing prices, and gas prices in the last year. […]
New Fire Plan: Burn More Money
In the late 1990s, the Forest Service spent about $300 million a year on fire and the Department of the Interior spent another $100 million a year. Then came the 2000 Cerro Grande fire, which burned a billion dollars worth of homes in Los Alamos, NM. After that, Congress opened up the checkbook and told […]
EUs War on Cars
Some people say the “war on the automobile” is a right-wing myth. Then the European Union goes and proposes to ban cars (or at least fossil-fuel-burning cars) from cities by 2050. To complement this ban, the EU proposes to significantly increase fuel taxes (as if they were not already high enough). It also hopes to […]
The Washington Times Gets It Wrong
The Antiplanner generally appreciates the efforts of the Times, a fiscally conservative paper that tries to watchdog government agencies that waste tax dollars. But an editorial last Friday about highway user fees missed the point. The article was written in response to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report on highway user fees. “The claim is that […]
Is LaHood Admitting Defeat?
Last week, Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood designated the Boston-to-Washington corridor as an eleventh high-speed rail corridor. This makes Amtrak eligible for some of the $2.4 billion in high-speed rail funds released when Florida rejected federal funds for the Tampa-Orlando route. Of course, $2.4 billion won’t even scratch the surface of Amtrak’s $117 billion plan […]
Teachers Union and Tea Party Agree
After the dispute in Wisconsin, it is hard to believe that school teachers and Tea Party members would ever agree on anything. But 150 teachers and other school advocates held a protest march in Chicago demanding an end to tax-increment financing (TIF)–something that most Tea Partiers would readily agree to. The protesters noted that half […]
Reining in the Tax-Gobbling Menace
Rahm Emanuel, the newly elected fiscally conservative mayor of Chicago, wants to “overhaul” that city’s tax-increment financing program, which he says “morphed from a tool for blighted economic communities into an all-purpose vehicle.” TIF was first used in Chicago by Mayor Harold Washington in the 1980s, whose goal was to help blighted neighborhoods. Critics say […]
It’s Still Dead
Sometimes I feel like Chevy Chase proclaiming, week after week, that Franco, by which I mean Florida’s high-speed rail, is still dead. Yet people are still trying to revive Florida’s high-speed boondoggle. The latest is a just-released ridership projection showing that the rail line, if built, would earn an operating profit as soon as it […]
Why Do Reporters Love Trains So Much?
As C.P. Zilliacus noted in one of his comments yesterday, Slate published an article subtitled, Why Do Conservatives Hate Trains So Much?. The writer, David Weigel, covered most of the bases, but a couple of clarifications are in order. First but not foremost, Weigel seems to confuse passengers with passenger miles when he writes, “Amtrak […]
The Chinese Have a Phrase for It
A new trend in Chinese is to turn an active verb into a passive verb–usually with a sinister context–by prefixing the character “bei” (pronounced “bay”). For example, bloggers who have been censored will say they’ve been bei huh-shyeh, or “harmonized”–a reference to the Chinese government’s efforts to create a “harmonious society.” This new, and formerly […]
