(The Seattle Post-Intelligencer posted the following editorial on its website on August 1.)
SEATTLE — The Bush Domestic Doctrine can be boiled down to this: Take a federal program — any federal program — and claim that it will run better, more efficiently when its control is transferred to the states.
The latest incarnation is Amtrak, the national passenger rail service created by Congress three decades ago. Amtrak is losing money — always has. The tab for those 32 years is about $27 billion (far less than what we’re spending in Iraq in just one year).
But the administration says it’s the states’ turn to run and pay for Amtrak.
In some places it could work. Trains running between the northeast cities of Boston and Washington, D.C., already are extraordinarily popular. And, perhaps a regional railroad could work in some locations, but what about a national railroad policy?
It seems clear to us that only the federal government can manage a rail service that travels between oceans, across deserts or mountains, and serve states with scant population as well as those with higher density.
Texas Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison — usually a strong supporter of the president — says a state-run train system would kill passenger rail in the country because too many cash-strapped states will not pay for it.
“If one state doesn’t keep its commitment, even if other states do, then Amtrak fails,” she told the Houston Chronicle.
Of course failure is the goal anyway. Many conservatives have never liked Amtrak. In their minds, Amtrak is almost as awful as spending federal dollars on mass transit. Sound (Transit) familiar?