North Carolina High Speed Rail

North Carolina Governor Bev Purdue recently Tweeted on a blog entry regarding North Carolina High Speed rail:

Today, NCDOT’s Rail Division officially received the first $20.3 million of the $545 million allocated to our state for high-speed rail improvements under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. North Carolina was granted the sixth highest award to any state as part of President Obama’s high-speed rail plan, demonstrating the growing strength of our rail program.

Jeez.  Here we go…

So, two issues with this:

1.  If high speed rail was a viable venture it would fund itself.  We wouldn’t need the government to provide funding.

2.  I’m sure this is about jobs.

We recently introduced a new mid-day service on our Piedmont route between Raleigh and Charlotte and are planning to launch a fourth daily service between the two cities as early as 2012.

Okay, so it looks like their may  be a need for this expanded rail service.

And the jobs?

It will also help create 34 new jobs for Amtrak train engineers and conductors, as well as personnel who operate and maintain the trains.

Ah!  Great!  34 new jobs will be created, that is fantastic horrible  news!  So, let’s run the math:

$20,300,000 divided by 34 comes out to $59,704.  Once.

Where will we get the money to pay these “engineers” after year 1?

Another example of a TON of money taken out of productive hands and given to government.

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3 responses to “North Carolina High Speed Rail

  1. Pingback: New Hanover County N.C. Commissioners pass resolution supporting Arizona immigration law « Goodtimepolitics

  2. goodtimepolitics

    It makes me wonder why its been all most 2 years before this $20.3 million was funded by the American taxpayers. This will take years to complete and could be stopped not long after the work begins for lack of funds… $20.3 million will not be enough to finish the high speed rail system, that is if work gets started on it.

    Funny that Democrat Governor Bev Purdue brought this up just as we’re going into the Mid-Term Elections. It’s a buying vote thing that the democrats seem to be good at doing with Barack Obama in the White House.

    • This will take years to complete and could be stopped not long after the work begins for lack of funds… $20.3 million will not be enough to finish the high speed rail system, that is if work gets started on it.

      Oh, for sure. 20.3 is a drop in the bucket to implement the system they envision.

      It’s a buying vote thing that the democrats seem to be good at doing with Barack Obama in the White House.,/i>

      Politics at it’s worst.

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