lubu wrote:
Most troubling is the apparent disregard of the public will on new spending. We were told we had to get an income tax passed because we could not even pay for the bare minimum necessities. Now Mike Repay is saying the county can toss 2 or 3 mil into the fire from the county income tax every year. Many methods of deception are used in the argument for expansion. First 5600 NEW riders. There is no way to "know" this, it's all a guess, and the number is function of the number of train trips proposed and the train capacity. Then, a person who rides into Chicago in the morning is a rider and that same person is counted again as a rider when they come to dyer in the evening. The report also conflates the initial costs with the over optimistic future expansions benefits to points east, leading you to believe it cost effective. It goes on. The initial costs are provided by a multi-national engineering/contractor who stand to profit if construction proceeds. They have an incentive to give low initial estimates, to get the ball rolling, which will follow with higher bids then even higher change orders and cost overruns. One last point to the dishonesty of the story. It was stated a new dyer stop alone would have riders bring 147 million back in paychecks. Also stated was that the state of indiana would see 5 million in sales and income taxes from those paychecks. The math on that doesn't work and it tells me that the numbers are fiction.
Nice framing of the situation. My only reservation about it all is - sometimes these guys are right. Still, I'm leery at the hard sell. There is something really subversively totalitarian about it, with respect to the past referendum in in 2009. The Times' propaganda here is paranoiac.
What jades me is the utter propagandistic overkill by the TIMES. You'd think they were trying convince themselves and not the readers. So much propaganda. It is paranoia. Meanwhile, everybody pretty much knows why the trains are wanted: it's a Trojan Horse for the construction industry. I'm okay with that, as i'm Keynesian/Reichean in terms stimulating the economy with government funds.
The real problem, though, is the SouthShore is a government subsidized transportation service. Should the expansion go in, there will an ever higher subsidy price/cost.