At the outset, I find it necessary to genuflect to President Bush’s (the Younger) handling of the war effort. Even though we have not yet captured or killed Osama bin Laden, the manner in which our powerful military defeated the Taliban and al Quaeda (Afghan forces President Reagan and George Bush the Elder helped create to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan) was superb, and proves that President Clinton did not weaken our military the way that President Bush and other right wing nuts have charged, as it is the military left by Clinton less than one year prior to the commencement of the war that has defeated the Taliban and al Quaeda.

Having genuflected, it appears to me that the proper name for the current President Bush is Rerun. We have a war in the Middle East, tax cuts for the wealthy, deficits created out of surpluses and ever higher unemployment with a resulting recession. We even have loud bravado about no tax hikes. Sound familiar. It is familiar. Just like dad. And it didn’t work then and it’s not working now.

President Reagan cut taxes in the early 80s and the result was that deficits tripled. Over the Reagan/Bush years (1980-1992), the deficit that our great country created until 1980 tripled. The result was a recession. The only way out of the recession was the tax hike of 1993. That tax hike caused the Democrats to lose control of both Houses of Congress, but created the greatest peacetime economic expansion ever, with the lowest unemployment, in history – while creating surpluses and causing the deficit to actually decline. This led to stable interest rates, as government borrowing declined, causing interest rates to drop.

All of this was clear and took place on our collective watch. When President Bush called for tax cuts primarily for the wealthy in his campaign, everyone thought he was out of his mind – and he lost the popular vote by over 500,000 votes in the election. Nonetheless, when he became President it became clear that wealthy Republicans and conservative Democrats were actually going to give themselves and their friends lucrative tax breaks — and the economy went in the crapper. The result – the same as when this was done in the 80s and early 90s – recession, higher unemployment, lower surpluses which will clearly become deficits. It’s hard to believe we actually followed this failed course again. But Rerun was able to take care of his friends.

Amtrak privatization is another one of those issues that has clearly failed and should never again be resurrected. Whether it’s the freights again running passenger service, or other Balkanized private companies attempting to run high speed rail, intercity passenger service, the model has failed – failed in the U.S. and failed abroad. But that doesn’t stop the morons on the ARC (including several Democrats) from attempting to slime their way to a federally funded privatized operation for providing high speed, intercity rail passenger service.

In days of old when knights were bold, the freight railroads ran intercity rail passenger service. The costs of intercity rail passenger service was one of the major reasons many of the freight roads were either unprofitable or marginally profitable. One of the major reasons for the wreck of the Penn Central was the cost of providing intercity rail passenger service. That was the prime reason Amtrak was created – a recognition that intercity rail passenger service must be separated from the freight railroads and had to be subsidized – the same way it is subsidized in all other countries in the industrialized world.

The lesson was so clear that in the early 1980s, Congress required Conrail to shed its commuter lines, spinning them off into publicly funded commuter services. Metro North, SEPTA, New Jersey Transit and other commuter operations resulted from this legislation. This was done in recognition of the fact that Conrail could not be a profitable operation if it was required to operate commuter services.

Amtrak has been inadequately funded during all of its existence and has still provided intercity rail passenger service throughout the United States. It has undergone several total changes of its management, the latest occurring in 1998. It is the most efficient provider of intercity rail passenger service on the earth – obtaining a larger percentage of its operating costs from the fare box than any other rail passenger service on the earth. Yet it is constantly under attack from morons like the majority on the ARC who have no knowledge about how to run a railroad or a passenger railroad – people who are willing to see the destruction of intercity rail passenger service in order to prove new ideas about how to provide such service. And the ideas they have put forward have failed all over Europe.

The time has come to get real. Tax cuts for the rich and privatization of Amtrak are ideas that have failed. Those ideas have devastated the economy and weakened our ability to provide high speed, intercity rail passenger service in the United States. Let’s act like grown-ups and remove these ideas from the national debate. We’re really not interested in a Rerun of failed ideas.