The Significance of High Speed Rail: It's Rational & Necessary Public Spending

The current political debate on government spending has completely missed the boat:
- on the relevance of government generally, 
- on the legitimate purpose of federal bureaucracy, 
- on the rationale for government intervention in the affairs of citizens and the operating mechanics of the country, 
- on the benefits of state and federal engagement via specific initiatives. 

There should be no doubt in the sensible person's mind that there should be significant and legitimate concerns about bloated, ineffective and inefficient federal and state level bureaucracies. 
Chief amongst these areas for improvement are the open ended and unfunded entitlement liabilities which need constant legislative management lest they overwhelm and cripple future government spending. 
A close second, is the archaic and calcified defense-industrial complex, which has sapped huge capital from the national economy, encumbered all of us with enormous debt obligations to foreign interests and has proven insufficient to the task of meeting modern day security challenges. 

But with all of that said, the two basic areas where public spending consistently yield considerable multi-generational returns for the investment, are multi-sector Research and Development and Public Use Infrastructure projects.


All indications from the Department of Homeland Security, The Department of the Interior, The Commerce Department, The Department of Transportation, etc, etc are that the majority of the current federal, state and municipal infrastructures, which we all rely on, are decaying or are over taxed versus current demand, and are largely in need of vast revitalization and modernization if the United States wishes to meet the demands of an expanding population and meet 21st Century Challenges.


The systems in immediate need include, air, land and sea transit, land based power generation, overland power transmission and consumption modulation and regulation, water management, waste management. At some stage, SP will address all of these in detail. But to open the conversation, let's take one example.

If we focus on just one aspect of one of these systems, land transit, we find potentially debilitating stresses to passenger and freight rail systems, overland state and interstate highway systems. These stresses are largely related to over use, under maintenance, and the failure to utilize new technologies to mitigate the volume stresses to the system. 

Our opening case can be made very simply: 
Why do we use 60-120 year old rail systems to deliver goods, materials and passengers across regions and the entire country at a rate of speed and dependability comesurate with the technologies available at the time of that deployment? 
Are people in this country generally using cell phones from the 80's today? Are those phones from the 80's as effective or efficient as phones today? 

Then why do we accept marginally effective yet obvious anachronisms of technology, materials, manufacturing, and safety specifically as it relates to infrastructures? Is it just because it's a decision requiring consensus in the public domain, instead of a choice of private consumption? 

SP extends an open invitation to anyone to make the case against these types of systems: the debate against intelligent infrastructure spending has no basis on comparatives versus other spending allocations in the federal budget, other investment returns, jobs creation, R&D incentivization and several other categories. 

Until next time.