Orange Julius opens his piehole to spew more nonsense:
House Speaker John Boehner on Thursday dismissed a reporter’s question about Amtrak funding as authorities continued investigating the Tuesday derailment that killed eight people near Philadelphia.
“Are you really going to ask such a stupid question?” Boehner, an Ohio Republican, said, cutting off the reporter mid-question during a briefing at the U.S. Capitol. “They started this yesterday, it’s all about funding, it’s all about funding.”
“The train was going twice the speed limit,” Boehner said. It is “hard for me to imagine that people take the bait on some of the nonsense that gets spewed around here.”
Well, yeah. Funding actually did have something to do with the crash:
Money has also been an issue in implementing positive train control.
The Federal Railroad Administration has calculated the cost of the system at $52,000 per mile of track. The railroads have put a total price tag of more than $9 billion on the system and said they have spent $5.2 billion so far. One of the biggest problems is that the system needs to be interoperable, meaning that communication is necessary between equipment used by different railroads, even if the railroads use different types of equipment.
The Federal Railroad Administration twice sought extra funding from Congress to finance the technology for Amtrak and other commuter rails. A first request for $825 million was ignored. A second request for extra funding was made this year for the 2016 budget as part of the Department of Transportation’s Grow America budget.
“Clearly, one of the hurdles that Amtrak has and the commuter rail industry has is that this is very expensive technology,” Mr. Szabo said. “It was never funded. The failure to invest in Amtrak’s capital program clearly has been a hindrance in more timely deployment. The way to make public rail a priority would be with public funding.”
I don’t understand how these guys continue to get elected when they clearly live in an alternate reality. Whenever someone proposes even the mildest cut to the obscenely bloated military budget, these guys fall over themselves running to microphones to detail the disastrous consequences of not shoveling over a couple hundred more billion to defense contractors. But with everything else, they think they can just slash and cut as much as they want and there are no consequences.
Infrastructure costs money. Roads and railways and airports and bridges deteriorate without repairs, and they don’t upgrade themselves. So yeah. When a bridge collapses in Wisconsin Minnesota or a train crashes in Philly or a coal mine blows up in West Virginia or planes collide on a runway, sure, there were other contributing factors, but lack of repair, overloaded systems, lack of oversight brought on by inadequate funding are at the forefront.
It’s just reality.