The Springfield Monorail

The Springfield Monorail

by Mark Luedtke

As I followed a huge, subsidized city bus belching black
smoke and carrying only three passengers through downtown the other night, I wondered how best to describe
just how harmful President Obama's and Governor Strickland's
socialist dreams of passenger and high-speed rail are. My
girlfriend suggested I watch the Springfield Monorail episode of The
Simpsons, so I did.

“You know, a town with money is a
little bit like the mule with a spinning wheel. No one knows how he
got it, and danged if he knows how to use it.” Con-man Lyle
Lanley, played by both Obama and Strickland, sell the people of
Springfield, played by Ohio and American liberals, an unnecessary, dangerous
monorail. Homer Simpson, played by the Ohio Department of
Transportation (ODOT), falls in love with the monorail which
immediately races out of control while Lanley absconds with all the
money. It's like writer Conan O'Brien had a crystal ball.

The most immediate rail plan is for the
state to spend $100 million of Obama's stimulus boondoggle on the
purchase of two train engines and six to eight passenger cars. Both
trains would travel round trip through the
Cincinnati-Columbus-Cleveland corridor every day starting in 2010. Rail proponents never mention that those
train engines and passenger cars would be running today if Ohioans were
willing to pay for that service. They're not.

Despite that, proponents say
Ohioans support the passenger line, as if people were merely responders to misleading poll questions instead of consumers and taxpayers. They pretend Obama created money out of thin air to fund their
pet project, so they're happy. And they think it's OK that no profit will be
made from the project - ODOT plans to pay
Amtrak to operate the service at a loss. That's just stupid.

Yet proponents claim this project will boost our
economy. That's because they have no understanding of economics.
Money is not created from thin air. Government takes money from the
people by force in the form of taxes, loans that must be paid back,
or inflating the money supply. Regardless, taxpayers pay. Taking money from taxpayers that would have
been used to fund profitable ventures and instead using it to subsidize
an unprofitable service makes every Ohioan more
poor and harms our economy. Leftists must get a kick out of forcing millions of people who will never use a service to fund their boondoggle projects. Unfortunately, it's easy to see the direct effects of the
passenger rail, but not the more powerful, painful consequences. You
can take pictures of the trains and the couple of passengers who
might ride it, but you can't take a picture of the lost jobs it will
cost to fund.

But Amtrak told ODOT that the
Cincinnati-Columbus-Cleveland corridor “is probably the best
underdeveloped passenger rail corridor in the U.S.” That's like Soviet economic planners (who seemingly all work
for Barack Obama now) telling Americans how to run our economy. The
Federal government owns 100 percent of Amtrak. It's a purely
socialist company. The government
subsidizes it to the tune of $1.3 billion per year, and it's been a subsidized disaster since the day
it was founded. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac look successful compared to Amtrak, but leftists look forward to having Amtrak suck
down Ohioans' tax dollars as they sing and dance the Springfield
Monorail song long after Obama's stimulus funding stream has dried up.

But Obama's and Strickland's socialist
railway plans don't end with passenger rail. Obama's stimulus
boondoggle also provides $200 million to plan and design a
statewide high speed rail network to connect into a regional network. I'm sure the privileged few who ride
the couple of high speed rail corridors in the US would tell us how
fabulous high speed rail is, but taxpayers subsidize
their privilege. I don't want my tax dollars subsidizing Wall
Street executives to travel to Washington to wine and dine Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. I don't want my tax dollars subsidizing a bunch
of fat cats to take high speed rail from Cincinnati to Chicago to
catch a Cubs game either.

High speed rail is not all it's cracked
up to be anyway. Overruns, delays and corruption tend to double the cost. Railroad crossings dictate the maximum speed railroads can travel, and in populated areas like
Ohio, it's unlikely any rail could reach high speed for long.
And high speed rail isn't as green as leftists claim either. Operations don't use a lot of energy, but
building and maintaining the tracks produces a tremendous amount of
carbon. Florida and California high speed rail planners projected that their projects will produce basically the same amount of
greenhouse gases or more than the cars the projects are supposed to
replace.

That's because railways take very few
cars off the road. You simply can't carry nearly as many people on
one or two tracks as you can on a highway. That makes passenger rail a waste of real estate as well as jobs and money. Additionally, more
buses, shuttles and taxis are required to carry rail passengers from
stations to and from their homes and final destinations.

Nothing creates waste and corruption
like government money looking for a place to be spent. Passenger rail has failed in more collectivist cultures like Japan and Europe, and Ohio has enough abandoned railroad track already. Elite leftists don't like riding buses, but buses are
a far more cost effective and energy efficient solution to Ohio's mass transportation needs than Obama's Springfield Monorail.

References:

http://www.cleveland.com/news/index.ssf?/base/news/1228469556213080.xml&coll=2

http://www.heritage.org/research/budget/bg2072es.cfm

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9753

Here's a couple of pics for inspiration:


85658130.4Y1pZUUF.jpg



147004063_37c975c51e.jpg


65352938.4KyHnuWI.DSC_0179.JPG