Long Distance Runaround

You'd think that, since Donald Trump wants to rebuild the nation's infrastructure, he'd make a commitment to building up and modernizing Amtrak.  Actually, he seems set on destroying it.

The proposed budget cuts affecting Amtrak's Gateway rail tunnel between New Jersey and New York under the Hudson River - a project Trump backer and New Jersey governor Chris Christie supports - have gotten the most attention, but generally overlooked by the mainstream media (which relies on airline commercials) is the proposed elimination of Amtrak's long-distance trains, like the Empire Builder from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest, shown below.

Amtrak doesn't get a lot of ridership on its long-distance lines.  The national passenger railroad uses its profits from the more lucrative Northeast Corridor to fund the long-distance routes.  The Trump administration says it wants to end subsidies for these long-distance lines so that Amtrak can "focus on better managing its state-supported and Northeast Corridor train services."  Nice rhetoric, but to do so would undermine the idea of a national passenger rail service and also likely undermine support for any passenger rail.

"Amtrak operates 15 long-distance trains across the nation, and these routes offer the only Amtrak service in 23 of the 46 states we serve," Wick Moorman, Amtrak's president an chief executive officer, said in a statement. "These trains connect our major regions, provide vital transportation to residents in rural communities and generate connecting passengers and revenue for our Northeast Corridor and state-supported services.  Amtrak is very focused on running efficiently - we covered 94 percent of our total network operating costs through ticket sales and other revenues in [fiscal year] 2016 - but these services all require federal investment."

Former Republican Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi was anathema to liberals, but he supported Amtrak, and I, for one, was grateful for his support.  But he also made it clear that legislators outside the Northeast wouldn't support a system that benefited only the eight states on the Northeast Corridor line - "No national system, no Northeast Corridor," he said.  He had a point, and the point could be made for the other fifteen states with Amtrak service that includes trains other than long-distance ones.  We in these 23 states can't count on lawmakers from the other 27 states, especially those from states that don't even have Amtrak service (like South Dakota or Wyoming), to support Amtrak if it doesn't benefit the whole country.  It's not called Netrak or Caltrak, it's called Amtrak - "Am" for America.  Take a look at Amtrak's route map; the problem isn't that there are too many long-distance train routes, there are too few!      

Good grief, Idaho only has Amtrak service in the tip of its panhandle.  The population centers in the southern part of the state are completely shut out.

I can't help but wonder if Trump's Amtrak spending proposal is just a Trojan horse to get rid of the system altogether.  Trump is a businessman who wants to run America like a business, and any businessman knows that passenger trains make little if any profit, so I am highly skeptical of his intentions.  It could be very well be that passenger intercity trains will soon be as extinct as passenger pigeons, at least in this country.  Apart from Americans who live in towns with commuter rail service - I am not one of them - the only time any of us will get to ride a train is if we travel abroad (yeah, right!) or go on a tourist train using cars and engines only slightly older than most of Amtrak's fleet.

Sad.     

Deadbeat Nation

Hoo boy! Republicans drove up the debt under George Walker Bush, they put on a credit card two wars Barack Obama is trying to end on a credit card, and now they're refusing to raise the debt ceiling without deep spending cuts hurting the poor and the middle class while leaving tax breaks for the rich alone?

If they win control of both houses of Congress next year, it will be by numbers - the hard numbers that force the Democrats to defend more Senate seats and try to win back the house in the face of GOP-friendly re-apportionment - and by numbers only.

But then, if the Republicans drive America into default, they will demonstrate to independents, as David Brooks wrote in the New York Times, that they're not fit to govern. Which means there will be a silver lining if America defaults on its debts and all hell breaks loose in the international markets come August 2. This could mean that the country will be a red nation in terms of budget ink but not Republicanism.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan says he doesn't want America to go the way of Greece. that could very well happen if his party brings debt ceiling talks to the form of brinkmanship.

You Call This a Budget Deal?

Planned Parenthood may have been spared from the budget deal worked out in Washington over the weekend, but the deal still chomps the royal prong.

The National Science Foundation got its research funding cut by $43 million. Pell college grants and AmeriCorps were spared, but education spending and social programs were cut overall by $5.5 billion. Health care took one of the biggest hits from the Republican House majority. Talking Points Memo lays out the ugly numbers: $1 billion in cuts to programs preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS and other diseases, $600 million in cuts to community health care centers, and $78 million in research on controlling health care costs. (That's one cut I happen to agree with. How do you control health care costs? Here's the answer for free: Establish single-payer public medical insurance.) The GOP gleefully went after a provision of the health care law, eliminating entirely funding for health co-ops created by the law.

Funding for the Environmental Protection Agency was reduced by 16 percent, along with a $49 million cut to climate change programs and $149 million reduction in the budget of the Land and Water Conservation Fund. And, I also understand, grey wolves been taken off the endangered species list, allowing states to make lots of money to issue hunting licenses for them and allowing the feds not to spend money protecting them.

And then there is high-speed rail funding. While federal spending on high-speed rail from now until September 30 has been eliminated and $400 million of the funding appropriated for the program in the 2010 fiscal year has been rescinded, the Federal Railroad Commission has sought to soothe fears of rail advocates by saying that $2.5 billion appropriated by Congress for Fiscal Year 2010 means that there is now $2 billion in high-speed rail funding available, down from the $2.4 billion previously available because of the previously mentioned rescission of $400 million, with $100 million apparently already spent.

So, it turns out, we were actually kind of lucky.

Did everything get cut? No - military spending is up by $5 billion!

No two ways about it: This deal sucks. It does nothing to ensure the social well-being of the country and it does not spread the sacrifice fairly. The military spending increase, in case you haven't noticed - and you probably haven't - is only $500 million less than the education, health and labor cuts!

If I were in Congress, I'd vote against it.

Budget Deals and Other Things

Funding for the Environmental Protection Agency has been saved in the latest federal budget deal. So has funding for Planned Parenthood. And apparently, I can now report, the National Endowment for the Arts. But President Obama realizes that he needs to come up with new cuts going forward in preparing the 2012 federal budget, and so he plans to propose cuts in Medicare and Medicaid. In ticking off the Democrats, he hopes that these cuts will make defense spending cuts and upper-income tax increases more acceptable to the Republicans.

Sure, when hell freezes over.

The spending cuts we're likely to get will continue, as they have for thirty years, to affect mostly the poor and the middle class. We'll be seeing more tax cuts for the rich and more programs and amenities wiped out. Far from heralding a golden progressive age, Obama's presidency looks to be the final act in destroying the amenities and services that make a country worth living in.

By the way, I saw the Johnny Depp-Angelina Jolie movie The Tourist yesterday, and I particularly took note of the high-speed train scene where their characters first meet. I grew envious of the sleek passenger cars, the comfortable seating, the elegant dining car . . . and, of course, wanted to blurt out, "Why can't we have this in America?"

Because the people in charge of America are in no mood to provide decent public services for its citizens, especially anything that reeks of too much "government spending" and "socialized medicine" or "socialized transport."

For more than twenty years now, I've always voted in favor of my own economic interests, particularly my interest in seeing better schools, modern intercity passenger rail, and, of course, single-payer health insurance. (Like Ed Schultz, I'm a single-payer guy.) Not all of the candidates I vote for win elections, but who cares if they do? Because no matter whom I vote for, no matter who wins, I lose!

And as far as I'm concerned, I think the game is almost over. That's when everybody loses. Except the rich, of course.

Although, when I think about it, maybe high-speed trains are an imperfect fit for America. The Tourist showed a high-speed train - the same kind of train President Obama hoped to get built in Ohio before John Kasich intervened - from Paris to Venice. Somehow, the idea of such a sleek, elegant train connecting Cleveland to Cincinnati - by way of Columbus - seems laughable.

Stinking

Lowell Weicker, the last Republican (unless I'm supposed to count Joe Lieberman) that Connecticut would ever send to the Senate, found himself embarrassed at having to defend the misogynistic planks of the 1984 Republican national platform to the media. "It's a pain in the ass to explain," then-Senator Weicker admitted. "No Equal Rights Amendment, no exceptions for rape or incest [with regard to abortion] . . .. On women's issues, it's a stinkeroo."

The smell of that platform would pale in comparison to the foul stench emanating from Republican efforts in the U.S. House of Representatives to cut Planned Parenthood funding, out of distaste for the organization's association with abortion. The argument from the Grand Old Patriarchs that federal funds for Planned Parenthood encourages abortion is intellectually dishonest. Under the Hyde Amendment, named for the late pro-life Illinois congressman Henry Hyde, there is no federal funding of abortion under any circumstances. (So what's this "No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act" about?) But Planned Parenthood provides various health services for women who would have a hard time finding other clinics offering such services - vital services like Pap smears and breast examinations, among other things, as well as advice on contraception. The haughty, self-righteous denunciation of Planned Parenthood by Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ) as a place where babies are "exterminated" and where abortion is taken lightly drew a sharp, courageous, and emotional response from Representative Jackie Speier (D-CA) about the abortion she once had to have to save her life despite her deep misgivings about the procedure.

"I lost a baby," Speier said while admonishing Republicans for graphically describing abortion. "But for you to stand on this floor and to suggest, as you have, that somehow this is a procedure that is either welcomed or done cavalierly or done without any thought is preposterous."

The Republican majority was unmoved. They voted to cut off Planned Parenthood funding, with a vote of 240-185.

But that's not the only fetid business from all this budget cutting. The House has also voted to end funding for public broadcasting (more on that later), ban the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases, and block funding for the health care law. Might makes right, don't it? :-O It also causes a horrid smell.

Did the House vote to defund everything in their quest for $61 billion of cuts? No - it voted to continue Army sponsorships of the National Association of Stock Car Automobile Racing.

But - on the bright side - the House rejected funding for a General Electric engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter plane, which the Pentagon doesn't want because it's satisfied with the Pratt and Whitney engine the F-35 also uses. One Republican attempted to keep funding for the GE engine to preserve jobs at a GE plant in his home state, despite his own opposition to wasteful government spending, but failed. The Republican in question is Speaker Boehner. (Aside: There is a God!)

Few if any of these cuts will pass the smell test in the Democratic Senate, which has vowed to restore them. (I have no idea how the F-35 cut will be received in the Senate.) Meanwhile, Florida's senior senator, Democrat Bill Nelson, hopes to do an end run around Florida governor Rick Scott's stinky decision to kill the Tampa-Orlando high-speed rail line. Nelson has insisted that most of the money to pay for it comes from the federal government, and that Floridians themselves would have to pay little to get the train up and running. A metropolitan planning organization in Tampa and a rail authority in southern Florida, Nelson told his constituents, have volunteered to step forward in place of the state to accept oversight of the project and the federal funds, with lawyers researching how to achieve it. To that effect, Nelson has met with U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood to keep the project afloat.

Nelson - who's vulnerable in his bid for re-election next year - cites the number of jobs this rail project will create and how much economic activity it will bring to Florida. Talk about creating jobs obviously registers with voters these days, and so Nelson is trying to define the high-speed rail line in those terms. There's only one problem. Because it would take awhile for the Tampa-Orlando high-speed trains to actually start running, Nelson has to talk in future tense.

People want jobs now.

That's a bad situation . . . and it stinks.

Budget Concerns

One of the biggest complaints about the extension of the Bush tax cuts is that they make it so much harder to cut government spending. Too many people have too much interest in the government programs that the commission report laid out by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson has suggested should be on the table. Already people are complaining about the proposed retirement age increase to qualify for Social Security - to 69 from the current 67. The Americans who need to wait to reach the age of 69 to begin collecting a Social Security pension, by the way, aren't concerned with it so much now. They haven't even started kindergarten yet. See, the retirement age would, under this plan, rise to 69 in 2075. But people who won't be around then are against it because they believe it opens the door for more rule changes that are detrimental to the American people.

If you want my humble opinion - well, maybe it isn't so humble - I can propose several sensible ideas. For example, we should the actually increase spending on mass transit and intercity rail projects while dramatically cutting highway spending for a net decrease in the federal transportation budget. We can move much more people by mass transit with a modest public transportation spending increase than we do with the massive amounts of money we already spend on highways. Also - and I'm actually with Rand Paul on this one - we should zero out farm subsidies that primarily help agribusiness, and we should encourage farmers to grow more diverse crops and create value-added products rather than limit themselves to the modest government-supported corn and soybean cash crops. And last but not least, stop spending so much money on the military, for Pete's sake - our multi-billion-dollar weapons systems aren't helping us win the war in Afghanistan. But no, all of that is too sensible, and even though I plan to write my Republican congressman to suggest these ideas, I doubt it's going to happen.

John Boehner and Mitch McConnell plan to start the new year with painful spending cuts that will hurt too many people even as the extended tax cuts help the rich, and many think President Obama, by allowing the tax cuts to be extended, has given them the rope to hang themselves with when they try to make those cuts. I hope this is correct, though personally, I think the President has given Boehner, McConnell, and their fat-cat friends the silk from which to produce expensive neckties - made in China - to wear to the inauguration of President Romney. Because when the deficit explodes, they'll just blame Obama for that.

After all, he agreed to middle-class tax cuts and a payroll tax holiday.

Which would make raising the retirement age irrelevant.

Oliver's Story

Sheila Oliver, the Democratic speaker of the New Jersey State Assembly, is not a happy camper. Her party recently was forced to give concessions on the state budget to Governor Chris Christie, a Republican, who played hardball with the legislature on the issue.

Oliver, who is black, had some choice words for Christie and his advisers on the subject of race and class, and it caused a stir not unlike the comments Shirley Sherrod was depicted to have made. Except that, though Oliver did say what she was reported to have said, she was expressing frustration with the arrogance of others; she did not show any arrogance of her own.

Oliver said that the Christie administration is an inner circle of white men who fail to understand the effects bus fare hikes and canceled tax credits are having on struggling working families. "That's why it’s so easy for them to sit around a table, slash this, put a line through that," Oliver told Tom Moran of the Star-Ledger. "How many of the guys sitting around that table have ever even sat on a bus?"

Sure enough, Oliver was criticized in letters to the editor for her racially derogatory remarks. Of course. Because apart from slavery, colonialism, genocide, predatory capitalism, and British art rock, what have white men wrought to warrant such abuse? :-O

Other letter writers liked to point out that white men take the bus just like anyone else. Really? You mean a city bus, not those snazzy commuter buses with sarcophagus seats that connect New Jersey to New York City? That would be news to anyone who rides city buses. I rode on one just yesterday, because I had to go to nearby East Orange (Oliver's hometown, incidentally), where the parking availability is atrocious. I think I saw one or two other white males on the bus. I was surprised to find that many.

If Christie has ever been on a bus, it must have been a long time ago. And, given his horrible driving record, it wouldn't have been a bad idea to ride them before he got himself a chauffeur.