If the government is going to spend a lot, you will eventually pay a lot. It isn’t as simple as just taking all of the assets of rich. They don’t have enough to feed the monster of Big Government and there is also a risk that with a slight increase in tax rates a lot of rich people will move assets offshore (like U2 did when the government of Ireland was threatening to raise their taxes).

[The Republicans have these choices as well too, of course.]

Huh? Did something change on the Democratic platform? Last I heard, income taxes were supposed to go down for anybody under $250K, which is pretty much everybody I know.

At least that was the plan. Personally, I suspect that the situation has degraded so far that taxes will need to increase, but I haven’t seen that reported yet.

Or maybe we should spend money on new bridges that would separate railroads from automobile traffic in the vertical plane; there are hundreds of people killed every year at the existing at-grade crossings, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the life saved per dollar of capital spent would be more cost effective with new bridges than with more automated signaling.

Better signaling probably would not help with running the trains on time any more than new traffic lights will fix highway congestion in places where the highways are congested, either. A lot of Amtrak’s routes outside the Northeast Corridor run on single track. If anything goes wrong with a freight train on a single track segment, that can create delays until the freight train can be moved out of the way. And there’s quite a bit of freight that contributes to the crumbling of highway bridges because the private freight railroads aren’t motivated to build much new track, and taxpayers are willing to pay for highways but not rail construction (which is probably penny wise and pound foolish).

I also think we should figure out how to fund a conversion to overhead power lines for all track that sees at least 30 trains a day (or some other reasonable cutoff); that would get rail freight from diesel (much of which has to be imported) to domestic energy. It would also make passenger rail service faster by improving acceleration and removing the need for Amtrak to swap between diesel and electric locomotives in certain places.

Phil, you must be writing about a different America than the rest of us live in.

“The mayor of Trenton, Douglas Palmer… plans to lay off 70 municipal employees and won’t fill 40 vacancies. “I’ve even had to demote firefighters,” he says.”

State and city budgets falling fast
Christian Science Monitor, Nov 14th
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/1114/p01s05-usec.html

There are a few infrastructure improvements that you could sell to me, new bridges and highways aren’t on that list. Repair of existing bridges, a more efficient electricity distribution system, an automated rail signaling and control infrastructure (we’re depending on people to keep two trains out of the same block? WTF?) that’d let us run higher density trains and passenger trains on time, all of those things make my list, but repair doesn’t have the glory of new stuff.

This new kleptocratic implicit guarantee of the salaries and bonuses of GS & AIG executives should make said those guys sleep pretty well.

Therefore, the taxpayer funds are already being directed to the most confident members of society who will spend it on financial assets and imported luxury goods. There appears to be little danger that the subsidies will be “wasted” by the debt serfs who are financing the programs on domestically-made automobiles or consumer goods, or on debt repayment (which, taken to its logical extreme, could eventually threaten the established social order: Imagine if new college graduates entered high-paying white collar jobs without $30k to $100k of debt!).