So I just lost an hour of my life to government budget cuts.
My wife works (hard!) for the federal government. She commutes on the DC metro-rail system like a huge percentage of working people in the DC metro area. For anyone who doesn’t know, this includes large areas of Maryland and Northern Virginia. Throw in those who take Amtrak and you’ve got a lot more.
Point is, the metro-rail makes it possible for hundreds of thousands of people to get in and out of DC without cars, thereby making rush hour traffic merely godawful as opposed to apocalyptically immobile.
Well, guess how somebody somewhere decided to balance the budget in 2010. Raise taxes? Hike fees? Reinstate a teeny bit of the estate tax over 3.5 million? Tax churches? Legalize and tax marijuana? End both our trillion dollar wars?
Don’t be naive.
How about we just cut down on the number and frequency of commuter trains responsible for keeping DC and vicinity functional?
Yeah, because it’ll really be good for the economy. Commuters will stay late at work to avoid the hell the metro stations have become. They’ll work more and spend their shrinking paychecks in bars and restaurants. Heck, maybe they’ll even have affairs! What a boon that would be for city motels! And don’t forget how much the day care centers will rack up in late pick-up fees when Mom and Dad don’t show up until eight and nine o’clock! Long-term beneficiaries will include child psychiatrists, divorce lawyers and drug rehabs! It’s trickle-down, baby! Reagan is risen! Yee-haw!
I’m told these cuts to public transportation are happening in all the major cities, but it’s especially galling to see it here in the nation’s capitol, where the very drones who drafted the cuts for their bosses are the ones riding the 2010 Voyage of the Damned.
Meanwhile, I’m sitting in my car with two tired kids waiting for their mom to emerge from the combination sardine can/petri dish of an overflowing metro car an hour after she was supposed to return to us. And all I can think is that the tax-free fantasy the GOP has been slinging since 1980 has finally caught up with us. The insane idea that we could live in a 21st century, first-world nation with a pre-World War 2 tax-rate so long as we put everything on the credit card is finally breaking down like an overcrowded subway car whose doors won’t shut and now the whole train’s being taken out of service.
I want to talk with a Russian who lived through the 90s back in the old country. I need to get an idea how long I have to set up my own crime family and start smuggling drugs, pimping girls from the countryside and murdering old people for their apartments.
Because that’s what happens when a superpower collapses and you don’t want to wait for the train.
