Dear Editor,
Dispatch columnist Martin Cheek echoes Ken Burns when spreading
a popular myth about how USA built the railroads. Did the taxpayers
pay the railroads, or vice versa? Myth holds that the taxpayers
subsidized the land-grant railroads.
Dear Editor,
Dispatch columnist Martin Cheek echoes Ken Burns when spreading a popular myth about how USA built the railroads. Did the taxpayers pay the railroads, or vice versa? Myth holds that the taxpayers subsidized the land-grant railroads.
In reality, the quid pro quo shows just the opposite. (James C. Nelson, “Government’s Role Toward Transportation” – Transportation Journal Summer 1962.
As provided in Section 22 of the original Interstate Commerce Act, the taxpayers were given lower freight rates in the exchange, and the net gain for the taxpayers was $580 million, measured in 1940 dollars.
Professor Nelson concluded that by June 30, 1943, the rail rate breaks for the taxpayers were estimated to be $580 million, “a sum several times the value of the granted land at the time land grants were awarded and in excess of the sums derived by the railroads from the grants.”
In today’s dollars, the savings for the taxpayers would just about equal VTA’s annual losses for their boondoggles, which really do cost the taxpayers. Re-writing history by distorting the truth is an unworthy endeavor.
Joseph P. Thompson, Gilroy
