You’ve heard of the bridge-to-nowhere and the train-to-nowhere. There is also the “plane to nowhere“:
Tea party lawmakers from rural areas were among those fighting the hardest to preserve taxpayer subsidies for airline flights into and out of small towns last year after senior Republicans tried to eliminate the oft-criticized program. Now, the House Appropriations Committee is awarding the program an 11 percent budget hike.
Next year, the subsidies would reach a record $214 million under a bill the GOP-run committee approved Tuesday.
The subsidies can reach hundreds of dollars per ticket — and can exceed $1,000 in a few routes. A recent change to the program will soon take care of such $1,000-plus cases, but critics of the program say more needs to be done to shelter taxpayers from runaway costs. Last year, the House voted to eliminate the program in the lower 48 states by 2013. But rural tea party lawmakers like Reps. Rick Berg, R-N.D., and Kristi Noem, R-S.D., were among those who fought to save it. Instead of killing the air subsidies, Congress in February approved a watered-down set of changes when passing a measure renewing federal aviation programs.
This is the same Congress which eliminated high-speed rail funding, and severely cut bike/ped programs. Unlike the “essential” air services program, high-speed trains and bike paths don’t require operating subsidies.
Systemic Failure 
Nice to know that these Tea Partiers are a bunch of hypocrites just like everyone else
For the ultimate in clusterfucks consider the EAS service to Merced. $2m for just over 2000 passengers per YEAR. $2m would be enough to run an additional San Joaquin round trip per weekday, which would have approximately 700 daily boardings, including 160 daily riders per day from the Merced station. That is to say that spending that money doing something like adding an extra round trip to the San Joaquin would carry the same number of passengers as the essential air service does in a year in about 3 days and would carry as many passengers from Merced in about 2 1/2 weeks.
Yeah. If we all paid our own way on our mode of choice, we would all have a little more money in our wallets and the price of gas wouldn’t seem so high. I’m so tired of subsidizing waste and hearing whining from the recipients….
You’d have to pay tolls. And gas taxes to cover pollution.
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