Dear editor:
In response to the sponsors’ invitation, here are my top ten
questions for the Transportation Forum scheduled for Friday at The
Strand Theater in downtown Gilroy.
Dear editor:
In response to the sponsors’ invitation, here are my top ten questions for the Transportation Forum scheduled for Friday at The Strand Theater in downtown Gilroy.
10. Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta said, “The crucial question in transportation today is ‘What should government do? And what should it leave to others?’ ” So, why do local leaders answer the “crucial question” with bigger government when the private sector is more efficient and less expensive?
9. Public Utilities Code Section 99268.10 prohibits a transit agency farebox recovery rate less than 15 percent, yet VTA violated this law, unlawfully taxing us beyond their lawful limit. When VTA filed their declaratory relief action last year they did not tell the court that they were in violation of the law. Will local leaders recover the illegal tax subsidies from VTA for the taxpayers’ benefit?
8. John Jay, our first chief justice, said that America would be a country where you could find one class, and equality of treatment for our citizens, and “each individual citizen everywhere enjoying the same national rights, privileges and protection.” Transportation attorney Abraham Lincoln said after the Emancipation Proclamation, that “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.” President John Kennedy said, “And so my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Why do local leaders violate the American ideal and force motorists to pay 99 percent of the cost of transit riders’ rides?
7. Declaring war on the automobile while paying individual transit system riders annual subsidies in excess of $400,000 in urban areas, is unsustainable policy because if successful it defeats itself. Why do local leaders want to deter self-sufficient transport, and encourage government-dependent deficit spending like our Sovietized transit agencies?
6. While subsidy recipients praise its “success,” the method of funding socialist transit reveals gross abuse of government leaders’ fiduciary responsibility to taxpayers, and their fiscal irresponsibility. Transit farebox recovery rates are nearly nothing applying generally accepted accounting principles, yet the Legislature and Congress permit them to conceal the enormity of their losses. False and misleading financial results are reported to the public. Why do local leaders tolerate this deception?
5. Limousine service would be cheaper than transit, than Caltrain and Amtrak, yet our elected leaders conceal the truth, and lie to the public, for their political rewards from public-sector unions. Why do our local leaders abuse the taxpayers in this manner?
4. By considering some social side-effects, e.g., political gain, and ignoring all negative externalities that the Political Transit Alliance refuses to admit, e.g., erosion of individual freedom, politics corrupts the decision making process, and damns us to ever-increasing socialist-communist transit.
Since no senior citizens, no disabled, disadvantaged or anyone else gets public-sector transit service in the USSR today, why are we adopting their failed economic policy? Do our local elected leaders think that they can make the Soviet’s dream a reality in America?
3. Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman said that democracy and socialism cannot co-exist. Lincoln said that we are a house divided, and could not remain so. While government must create and maintain the infrastructure, the carriage of passenger business is best in free enterprise markets envisioned by Adam Smith, not the statism of Karl Marx. There is no “free lunch,” and no “free Lite Rail Shuttle.” Why do local leaders want us to have socialist transit?
2. Mexico, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and many other countries de-nationalized their public-sector industries including transport in what the Wall Street Journal called the worldwide “privatization revolution.” Even Communist China has restored private property rights. So why do local elected leaders promote government-owned passenger businesses, e.g., BART, Amtrak, Caltrain, Bullet Train, County Transit, etc.?
1. Cities and counties across America that have privatized transit have saved money while their residents enjoyed better transport. San Jose Chamber’s Jim Cunneen, VTA Board members, and Silicon Valley CEOs have called for privatization of transit? When will local leaders privatize our bloated, wasteful, deficit-causing transit agencies?
When will they get out of bed with the public-sector unions?
Joe Thompson, Gilroy
Submitted Friday, June 4 to ed****@gi************.com
