Today on TAP online, Thomas Geoghegan notes that our mass transit system (or lack thereof) is not only getting worse by the year but faces a steeper problem: Who is going to pay for it?
America is disuniting. Compare the U.S. to the European Union. Over there, thanks to Eurostar (the high-speed rail system), easy transit to the airports, and Ryanair, Europeans have more geographic mobility than we do. Eurostar is more important to European unity than adopting a new EU constitution. Europeans are voting in a new constitution with their feet. It's getting easier to get from Dublin to Madrid, where Irish kids commute to do start ups. Over there, from Paris up to Brussels, I puff along on air. Over here, on our dilapidated rails, I have to jolt along, in effect, by stage coach.
It seems obvious that we should invest in high-speed rail and mass transit, but we don't. "Certainly," a friend, a business journalist, told me, "we've got the capital here to do something." But do we? As Louis Uchitelle reported in The New York Times a few weeks ago, in a global economy the big U.S. businesses have no stake in shoring up the local infrastructure, either with taxes or their own capital. In New Haven, he noted, the only big business that cares about sweeping the streets is Yale, which isn't going anyplace.
And our government is just about to flare off even more of the tax base in a one-time "stimulus" so people can buy more cars. The more we "stimulate" private spending, the faster the public infrastructure collapses. The harder it becomes even to get to the malls to spend.
Also, Tara McKelvey reviews two books which look at the expansion of executive power under George Bush, albeit from different perspectives:
In Takeover, Charlie Savage, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Boston Globe, provides a journalistic account of the rise of presidential power, examining the various steps by current and past administration officials to consolidate decision making in the executive branch. Though there is nothing particularly new in his book, Savage does a respectable job of pulling together disparate material and showing how the details fit into a larger picture. In The Terror Presidency -- a memoir from one of the key players inside the Bush administration -- Jack Goldsmith, now a professor at Harvard Law School, sheds light on critical internal legal debates regarding detainees that were previously unknown to the public. Though a lesser work in terms of its literary style and narrative structure, Goldsmith's book is more interesting than Savage's because of what it reveals, at times unintentionally, about the inner workings of the administration.
--The Editors
