Thursday, September 9, 2010

The most bizarre part of President Obama’s pre-election gasp to attract votes for November is the idea of high speed rail systems. It was one of the items in his new $50 billion spending proposal, as reported Sept. 7 by The Reason Foundation and others. Obama pulled from his political hat, at a Labor Day rally in Milwaukee, a desperate initiative to fix 150,000 miles of roads, lay or rebuild 4,000 miles of railroad tracks and redo 150 miles of airport runways.

“Putting high-speed rail on a par with highways for federal transportation funds is an incredibly bad idea - a system they hope people will be willing to change their lifestyles in order to use,” said the Reason Foundation article. It’s “one of the most expensive forms of transportation that a nation could choose,” Heritage Foundation Scholar Ronald Utt wrote in a backgrounder earlier this year. Full Piece