The proposal to build the bullet train in California is proof that socialists have taken-over our government. Based on past cost overruns, the price tag on this extreme boondoggle is about $75-$80 billion in today’s dollars. Paid back interest on these bonds will also burden our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren with billions more. Annual operating losses will exceed those of all light rails combined. Fares won’t cover 1 percent of operating expenses, estimated at $1 billion per year. Bond debt will bury us.
Technology exists to build it, but how do we pay the construction costs and operating costs? It’s technologically incompatible with existing railroads, so it will need BART-like right-of-way. Eminent domain power, included in the legislation creating it, ensures that it will plow through Gilroy and Morgan Hill and any other place, regardless of opposition. But it cannot cross the Union Pacific Railroad’s tracks because the Class I railroads’ eminent domain trumps bullet train’s eminent domain power, according to UP’s top commerce counsel on the West Coast.
Tourists will ride it, but enjoy a 99 percent taxpayer subsidy for rides that will cost more than those on the Concorde supersonic jets. Local small business owners will pick up the tab, maybe getting 10 percent back from tourist dollars if we’re lucky.
We’ve seen this issue in our nation’s history more than once. In 1995 future Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta said that the “crucial question” in transportation is: “What should government do? And what should it leave to others?”
In 1970 congressmen stood up in Congress and proclaimed that Amtrak would be “self-sufficient in three years.” Yeah. By Sept. 11, 2001 taxpayers had thrown about $30 billion in subsidies down that black hole, but did we have adequate airport security?
In 1863 Gen. Grenville Dodge, who was later UP’s top civil engineer, and who discovered the Sherman Pass over the Continental Divide, was summoned to the White House. He later said that he told the President that the government should own and operate the transcontinental railroad. Lincoln, who as a young member of the Illinois Legislature had seen government-owned railroads in Eastern and Midwestern States go bust and shutdown operations in the 1830s and 1840s, said no. He said that private enterprise must do it, although the government would assist with development incentives (my words, not his).
Well, they did it. And what did taxpayers receive in the deal? They got about $460 million (measured in 1940 dollars) more than the value of the land granted to the railroad corporations because of Section 22 in the original Interstate Commerce Act (lower freight rates for government shipments).
A hundred years ago the Progressive Movement, led by William Jennings Bryan, sought nationalization of the railroads and other industries, but their passion was rejected by voters.
When the railroads were nationalized in 1917 during World War I by Woodrow Wilson’s administration, government “genius” so badly botched-up the nation’s rail shipping that rail traffic came to a standstill. That experiment failed, just as Lincoln predicted it would. In the Transportation Act of 1920 the railroads were de-nationalized and came to be the envy of the world’s nations today; the backbone of our nation’s commerce.
Instead of making taxpayers pay for bullet train, like we pay for county transit, Caltrain, Amtrak, light rail, etc., etc., while motorists are paying 100 percent of their own transport costs, seeing our politicians rewarding transit wastefulness, why not use the unlimited power of capitalism? Have you been on I-5 lately to see the uninterrupted 24-7 tonnage flowing north-south in California?
I appeared before the bullet train commission five times over the last decade and told them that if they put enough UPS, FedEx and Postal Service tonnage on their trains, then they would not need to ask the taxpayers for a dime. Did they listen?
Like Amtrak’s promoters, their pie-in-the-sky predictions show that they did not listen, nor did they learn from history, either United States or world history in the last century and one-half.
So, hold on for the ride, and warn your children and grandchildren, our leaders will strap taxpayers to the rocket to hell. We’ll be paying unimaginable sums to attempt what Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and the USSR failed to achieve, despite all their promises to their citizens that socialism could bring utopia. If they fund it with gas taxes, be prepared to see $10/gallon for gas at the pumps.          Â
They’ll tax motorists out of their cars, leaving them to ride our Trojan Horses, and bike or walk the rest of the way. Instead of harnessing the unlimited capability of capitalism, our leaders will tie a deadweight albatross around taxpayers’ necks.
Joseph P. Thompson is a local transportation attorney. He’s a former president of the South County Bar Association. Reach him at
tr******@pa*****.net
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