Post by Major DebaclePost by bvallelyPost by bvallely.
Post by s***@yahoo.comHow about some ads that show what Republicans are capable of doing, in
a positive manner?
.
Post by bvallelyWhat we can do is stop the Democrats from destroying America.
.
How?
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By taking over Congress, and refusing to fund Obama's bills.
Let us know how that works out for in 2010.
.
Tell you what - here's something the Republicans will bring up next
year. See what you can say against this:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjcxMDQ3ZTNmY2E4MTdhNWRmNGZjZTYwMGZjZmUxYjU=
Going Nowhere Fast
Obama’s false promises on high-speed rail.
By David Freddoso
Book a train from Washington, D.C., to Chicago, and you’re in for a
ride that takes 17 hours, 35 minutes. Given the choice between that
and a two-hour plane trip, it’s little wonder that most Washingtonians
prefer to fly, despite the security searches and the long lines at
Reagan National. It is also little wonder that some airlines still
make money, whereas Amtrak, America’s near-monopoly provider of inter-
city passenger rail service, requires huge annual subsidies.
But what if inter-city train service became much faster? President
Obama wants to offer Americans such an option, and to that end he has
promised an $8-billion federal investment in high-speed rail, plus $5
billion more over the next five years. That’s just $13 billion in all,
and for that, Obama promises to start building ten different rail
corridors, each between 100 and 600 miles long.
“What we're talking about,” he says, “is a vision for high-speed rail
in America. Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city. No
racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on
the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes. Imagine
whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour, walking only
a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from
your destination.”
It sounds lovely, but before you go to sleep with visions of bullet
trains dancing in your head, it’s worth examining the numbers more
closely. Any real-life high-speed rail system on the scale Obama is
promising would be vastly more expensive than the $13 billion he has
committed; in fact, it would require close to half of the $787 billion
contained in his recently passed stimulus package.
We know this because high-speed rail systems in other nations were not
built, and are not operated, anywhere near so cheaply as Obama
suggests. In the past decade, Taiwan built a single 215-mile high-
speed passenger route for $15 billion. Germany, France, and Italy,
often cited as advanced railroad nations, subsidize their rail systems
heavily: Between 1995 and 2003, Germany spent $104 billion on
subsidies, France spent $75 billion, and Italy spent $64 billion,
according to a 2008 study by Amtrak’s inspector general. Rail
ridership in Europe far outpaces that in the U.S., but in spite of
these huge subsidies, trains have lost a significant portion of their
market share to automobiles and planes since 1980.
Although the U.S. has no true “bullet trains,” at least two states
have developed and approved detailed plans for high-speed rail that
came with cost analyses. In 2000, Florida voters approved a ballot
initiative mandating construction of a 320-mile bullet train from
Tampa to Miami via Orlando. The voters repealed it four years later
when they saw the price estimate of $25 billion. (Other estimates put
the cost as high as $51 billion in 2004 dollars.)
Last year California voters approved a ballot proposition to dedicate
$10 billion in bonds to a high-speed rail line slated to cost $45
billion just for its main leg between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
If this project is ever completed — which would require tens of
billions from the federal government or from private investors — it
will probably end up costing more like $65 to $81 billion, according
to a study by two rail experts at the Reason Foundation.
These are some benchmarks for the price of high-speed rail. Yet
somehow, Obama’s plan envisions spending a mere fraction of the cost
of either the Florida or the California plan, while sending trains
speeding along both those routes, as well as routes in New England,
Texas, upstate New York, Pennsylvania, the Gulf Coast, the Pacific
Northwest, the Southeast, and the Midwest. The document outlining
Obama’s strategic vision promises express trains running at speeds
above 150 miles per hour, rivaling some of the Japanese bullet trains,
the French TGV, and the Spanish AVE. Obama is promising such trains
virtually everywhere — you could take one from Little Rock to San
Antonio, if you chose.
“This plan incorporates all of the high-speed rail routes that were
federally approved several years ago,” says Ron Utt, a railroad expert
at the Heritage Foundation. “Nobody’s ever invested any money in them
because there’s not enough money anywhere to actually build them. This
is sort of like a concession to the rail buffs — that now we’ll
pretend we’re going to build them.”
In the real world of high-speed rail, Utt said, $13 billion gets you
“almost nothing . . . You would build more sidings and a couple of
extra double tracks here and there, and reduce the time of some of the
trips.”
At the very best, riders can hope that a few lines will get marginally
faster, along the lines of Amtrak’s Acela service. For between $133
and $155 (one-and-a-half to two times the price of a regular train
ticket), Acela cuts 20 to 27 minutes from the three-and-a-quarter-
hour, 230-mile trip between Washington, D.C., and New York City. The
trip would cost about $20 by bus, with high-speed Internet service the
whole way.
It is perfectly understandable why a politician like President Obama
would present a plan like this. In a time of fear and worry, promises
of high-speed rail excite the imagination, and Obama’s plan spreads
the empty promises among ten different geographic areas for maximum
political benefit.
What could be more presidential than promising a chicken in every pot
— even if all the plan actually delivers is an egg?
Post by Major DebaclePost by bvallelyBy sending tea bags to the White House?.
Aren't Democrats the same guys who thought the jerk who threw a shoe
at Bush was a hero?
--
When asked, years afterward, why his charge at Gettysburg failed,
General Pickett said: "I've always thought the Yankees had something to
do with it."