Back to the Future (National Review, 01.28.10)

Posted by hpayne on January 28, 2010

Detroit — President Obama clean jobs of the future look an awful lot like the obsolete jobs of the past. “Tomorrow, I’ll visit Tampa, Florida, where workers will soon break ground on a new high-speed railroad funded by the Recovery Act,” said Obama last night in his SOTU speech about a new Orlando-Tampa rail link.


Trains are the future? Obamaphiles are convinced that Communist China and an economically sclerotic Europe are the future (“there’s no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains that manufacture clean-energy products,” said the president), but trains have failed in the United States because they are unable to compete against planes and autos in a suburban country of open spaces.


Florida take note. Here in the Midwest, passenger rail used to run between the major metro hubs of Chicago and Detroit. It dried up long ago.


No private entity has been able to make a business case to get back in the business. And government can’t either. Which is why the feds rejected Michigan’s request for $993 million in stimulus funding to build “high speed” rail between Chicago and Detroit just this week (despite Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm’s lobbying that such rail is necessary to combat global warming).


The business model is a failure. Better to con the public out of its tax dollars by building an entirely new rail in a virgin Florida corridor. That’s never been tried before, right?

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