If you add up the federal government's known liabilities (such as military pensions and publicly held debt), its unfunded Social Security and Medicare promises and its other commitments, you get $56.4 trillion -- as the Peter G. Peterson Foundation calls it, the "real" national debt.
That's $184,000 per American.
Congress and the president must act on those staggering figures. At the very least, elected officials can start by refusing to add new and expensive programs to Washington's already long list of responsibilities.
That's why Washington should rethink the president's plan to spend $8 billion on high-speed rail corridors around the country.
The $8 billion is only a down payment, as federal officials freely admit. The money wouldn't cover the full cost of any of the lines being considered. Instead, the real price tag is hundreds of billions of dollars -- and that's for construction alone. The rail lines also would demand subsidies for every year they're in existence (and beyond, once the retirees' pension and health costs are factored in).
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All this at a time when the U.S. is facing deficits on a scale not seen since World War II?
No. As the Panama City (Fla.) News Herald editorialized, "this is the equivalent of buying a 50-inch plasma TV while your home is in foreclosure."
The Florida example is telling. The Obama administration wants to start work on a rail link between the Florida cities of Tampa and Orlando. But Interstate 4 already connects the two cities, which are only about 85 miles apart.
"And driving still is a lot cheaper per mile than rail service will be," the News Herald continues.
"Plus, driving offers the convenience of having a vehicle that gets you much closer to your final destination and on your own schedule. Rail passengers will have to disembark at a station and then secure a taxi, shuttle or bus to complete their journey."
Carl Hiassen, longtime columnist for the Miami Herald, feels the same way. "The problem with the bullet-train boondoggle is that the back-end costs will smother the front-end benefits and create a perpetual sucking drain on Florida's frail budget," Hiassen wrote Sunday.
"We'd be better off using the money to pave potholes."
Actually, that's not a bad idea. America's infrastructure -- including its existing rail infrastructure -- needs work. Why not use the money to help fix the roads and bridges that the population depends on?
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The Washington Post has its own version of that idea. "Sprinkling limited funds (on rail projects) across the country strikes us as an inefficient exercise, one that is ripe for pork-barrel politics," the Post editorialized.
"A better investment would have been to use all of that money to make the Northeast Corridor -- the nation's most traveled rail line -- a model for high-speed rail."
The point of all of these suggestions is this: Now is not the time to embark on bold new adventures in government spending. Now is the time to examine what we have and improve it as best we can, until such time as the federal budget comes back under control.
-- Tom Dennis for the Herald
