Dead Nation Walking

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

Many people seem to think that America has lost its sense of purpose. They overlook the obvious: that we are striving to become the Bulgaria of the western hemisphere. At least we already have enough vampires to qualify.

You don’t have to seek further than the USA’s sub-soviet-quality passenger railroad system, which produced the spectacular Philadelphia derailment last week that killed eight people and injured dozens more. Six days later, we’re still waiting for some explanation as to why the train was going 100 miles-per-hour on a historically dangerous curve within the city limits.

The otherwise excellent David Stockman posted a misguided blog last week that contained all the boilerplate arguments denouncing passenger rail: that it’s addicted to government subsidies and that a “free market” would put it out of its misery because Americans prefer to drive and fly from one place to another.

One reason Americans prefer to drive — say, from Albany, NY, to Boston — is that there is only one train a day, it never leaves on time or arrives on time, and it takes twice as long as a car trip for no reason that makes any sense. Of course, this is exactly the kind of journey ( slightly less than 200 miles) that doesn’t make sense to fly, either, given all the dreary business of getting to-and-from the airports, not to mention the expense of a short-hop plane ticket.

I take the popular (and gorgeous!) Hudson River Amtrak train between Albany and New York several times a year because bringing a car into Manhattan is an enormous pain in the ass. This train may have the highest ridership in the country, but it’s still a Third World experience. The heat or the AC is often out of whack, you can’t buy so much as a bottle of water on the train, the windows are gunked-over, and the seats are often broken. They put wifi on trains a couple of years ago but it cuts out every ten minutes.

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GOVERNMENT DRONE KILLS 7

Tax and spend liberals immediately seized upon this tragedy to push their bullshit storyline about the need for billions in new infrastructure spending. It was surely poor equipment or defective tracks that caused an Amtrak train to derail in Philadelphia, killing at least 7 people. They don’t even wait until the bodies are cold before spinning the disaster for their benefit.

Articles on Marketwatch and other liberal outlets screamed for billions of new spending, as if every road we travel isn’t already under construction. As if local, state and Federal governments don’t already budget billions per year for infrastructure. Liberal control freaks want taxpayers to give them more money so they can pay off contributors, benefactors, and unions with overpriced unnecessary infrastructure projects. It won’t be allocated to replacing ancient sewer pipes because that isn’t sexy and nameable.

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The true story is the engineer was driving the train at 106 mph coming around a turn in the tracks where the speed limit was 50 mph. A government union drone killed these people due to his incompetence and recklessness. It had absolutely nothing to do with infrastructure. Multiple trains travel this exact same route every day without derailing. Not one train has ever derailed at this bend in the tracks before yesterday. This man has to be thrown in prison for manslaughter. This is the level of government drone employed across the hundreds of agencies and departments destroying this country. The guy was probably busy ordering an iWatch on his iPhone.

Amtrak sucks $1.4 billion of taxpayer dollars into their vortex of incompetence every year. Approximately $900 million is supposed to be for capital improvements. But the Keynesian loving liberal control freaks want you to give them more of your tax dollars so they can hire more incompetent drones to upgrade our infrastructure at a cost two times what the private market would charge. Watch out for that treeeeee!!!!

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