New SECTRAN and Amtrak

[OlympianHiawatha]

Ray Lahood, Obama's appointed Secretary of Transportation just mentioned Amtrak as part of his plans to improve our transportation infrastructure, and interestingly, he listed it first. Considering he comes from Illinois, which has a very well developed Amtrak system, we may indeed have good things to look forward to.

 

[Irv]

Ray Lahood, Obama's appointed Secretary of Transportation just mentioned Amtrak as part of his plans to improve our transportation infrastructure, and interestingly, he listed it first. Considering he comes from Illinois, which has a very well developed Amtrak system, we may indeed have good things to look forward to.

Plans are one thing, finding the money is another.

After all the giveaways to greedy bankers and poorly-run auto industry, is there going to be anything left to fund things like fixing highway bridges and improving rail transportation?

 

[AmtrakWPK]

What's the difference? There isn't anything "left" as it is - they've BEEN spending huge oceans of money we don't have for the past few years anyway, long before the current stimulii packages and bailouts. At least they'll be spending it HERE, hopefully putting a lot of unemployed AMERICANS back to work, and it will be a beginning of the eons-overdue repair and rebuilding of our national transportation (and other) infrastructures - if we're really lucky, it may even yank us out of the deepening depression, instead of flushing trillions of borrowed money down the Iraqi toilet with nothing but a huge and ballooning debt for our kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids to pay off as a result.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

This gets into some questions about how you define wealth, and what money is.

Is wealth having an ounce of gold, or is wealth the result of having a person constructing track instead of collecting an unemployment check? The key to fixing our economy is to choose to believe the latter.

 

[AmtrakWPK]

Especially when more and more folks have been unemployed long enough that their unemployment has run out.