Free Republic

<p>In a move guaranteeing that 2,100 workers will be out of a job, two Indiana plants have plans to move operations to Mexico.</p> <p>The companies, who make products for heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC), will begin layoffs within the next two years.</p>

the California High-Speed Rail System will saddle taxpayers with losses between $124 million to $373 million a year. Exaggerated ridership estimates and slower-than-promised trip speeds make the California bullet train project a big financial loser for taxpayers... ... The [California High-Speed Rail Authority’s] financing assertions are virtual fantasy

Liberal editorial boards crack us up sometimes. Last week, the California High Speed Rail Authority announced its much ballyhooed super-fast choo-choo from San Francisco to Los Angeles, in the works for at least 15 years, is going to cost $98.5 billion and will be up and running by 2033. When taxpayers approved the project just three years ago, the authority pegged the cost at a mere $33 billion, with service beginning in 2020. Gee, a government project coming in way over budget and way behind schedule. Who could have known? Newspaper editorialists, for one. Still, in response to the news,...

Boondoggles: How can we tell if Congress is serious about reining in spending? A clear-cut, permanent defunding of high-speed rail would be one sign. But the pipe dream won't quite die. Sometime soon — or so we'd like to think — the fast-train fad will fizzle out, the victim of fiscal sanity and critical thinking. Just this week, a Senate Appropriations subcommittee controlled by Democrats actually voted to give high-speed rail nothing at all in the new fiscal year. That got our hopes up. Then the full Appropriations Committee mixed the message by approving $100 million for the program, which...

Add it to the bill. Just as weekend Rail Runner service to Santa Fe is set to end due to financial woes, it turns out the state needs to shell out an additional $16 million for track and system maintenance. That’s on top of the projected $25 million in yearly maintenance and operational costs – before the weekend service cuts – that have already created a budget crunch for the Belen-to-Santa Fe operation. The train has about 4,500 weekday boardings going one way and is expected to generate about $3.2 million in fares. Records reviewed by the Journal show an...

State officials say final design and construction plans have been approved for high-speed rail in western Massachusetts. U.S. Reps. John Olver and Richard Neal and Sen. John F. Kerry and federal and state transportation officials said Friday that the U.S. Department of Transportation signed a nearly $73 million grant agreement. Funding is available from federal stimulus money. Officials say the project, which is expected to cost $75.6 million, will rehabilitate the Connecticut River rail line. Amtrak’s Vermonter service will be rerouted to the line, providing a more direct route to Northampton and Greenfield.

Tim Pawlenty Supported Obama Calls for High Speed Rail Katie Pavlich Posted at 11:32 AM ET, 6/17/2011 Tim Pawlenty supports high-speed rail? Funded by the federal government? He did in 2009. Gov. Tim Pawlenty was one of eight Midwestern governors to urge Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood to make the Midwestern Regional Rail Initiative (MWRRI) a top priority in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The act, which includes a last-minute $8 billion for high-speed rails, would create a high-speed passenger rail that links Minneapolis and Chicago; a trip by rail between the cities would take about five and...

High-speed trains that Gov. Rick Scott rejected would carry more passengers and operate at a greater financial surplus than projected in a 2009 federal application, data the state released Wednesday showed. Figures averaged from findings by two independent consulting firms showed more than 3.3 million people would have ridden the Tampa-Orlando line in its first full year of operation in 2016, compared with a projection of 2.4 million in a previous study. The latest reports the Florida Department of Transportation commissioned at a cost of $1.3 million indicate a $10.24 million surplus from high-speed rail operations in 2016, with ticket...

Vice President Biden, an avowed friend of good government, is giving it a bad name. With great fanfare, he went to Philadelphia last week to announce that the Obama administration proposes spending $53 billion over six years to construct a "national high-speed rail system." Translation: The administration would pay states $53 billion to build rail networks that would then lose money - lots - thereby aggravating the budget squeezes of the states or federal government, depending on which covered the deficits. There's something wildly irresponsible about the national government undermining states' already poor long-term budget prospects by plying them with...

In the last decade, the symbol for profligate federal spending was the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere" -- a huge proposed span that would link the town of Ketchikan, Alaska, population 7,500, to an airport on Gravina Island. Powerful Alaska Republican lawmakers tried to stick American taxpayers with a huge chunk of the tab for this dubious project. This decade, the symbol for federal pork-barrel excess may well be Trains to Nowhere -- and if Democrats get their way, those boondoggles could span the country. At least in blue states. Last month, voters in Wisconsin and Ohio elected Republican governors. Rather...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Vice President Joe Biden continued the administration's rollout of the recently passed economic stimulus package Friday, highlighting $1.3 billion in federal funding for Amtrak. The money for the rail service, which carried almost 29 million passengers in the previous fiscal year, will go primarily to infrastructure repair and improvement. The $787 billion stimulus plan includes a total of $8 billion for improvements in rail service, a crucial investment to help ease traffic in the congested northeast corridor running from Boston, Massachusetts to Washington, Biden argued.

Dow Corning Corp. announced today that it will eliminate 800 jobs, or about 8 percent of its 10,000-member global work force, due to the poor economy. It is not known how many jobs will be affected at Dow Corning's corporate headquarters in Bay County or at its mid-Michigan operations, according to Jarrod Erpelding, a Dow Corning spokesman. Dow Corning has about 3,500 employees in Michigan and about 1,300 working at its Williams Township headquarters and factory in Auburn combined. The job cuts will occur during the first half of 2009 across the entire company through a combination of voluntary retirement...

Google to find

While the sluggish economy contributed to announcements of thousands more layoffs Monday, it may be helping some Silicon Valley companies grow. Fears of a recession seem to be making many people even more eager to protect their money, which has proved to be a boon to companies like Barracuda Networks, a Web security company based in Campbell. The company had about 20 job openings as of Monday. "Our market continues to grow and our business continues to grow, so we need to hire people," said President and Chief Executive Officer Dean Drako. The Barracuda head attributed the company's continued expansion...

Appearing as a guest on Thursday's Countdown on MSNBC, liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, also a Princeton University professor of economics, informed viewers of what he believes is "the reason to hate Exxon," which is because "it has not done anything to address the energy problem, and it's actually spent heavily on, you know, financing climate skeptics, on basically blocking intelligent policy, on muddying the waters of our debate." He also lamented that America did not follow Jimmy Carter's advice on energy policy: "If Jimmy Carter had actually managed to sell us on energy conservation 30 years ago, we...

The Dow Jones Industrial Average recently traded down more than 240 points, around 10988. The blue-chip indicator hasn't closed beneath the 11000 level since July of 2006. It hit a record high of 14164.53 on Oct. 9, 2007. The S&P 500 was down 1.7% to 1232.02. All of its sectors traded lower, led by a 5% slide in its financial sector. The energy-sensitive consumer-discretionary category was close behind, down 3.5%. The Dow and the ...

New York, NY (AHN) - The triple whammy of the soaring gas prices, tight credit market and the subprime mortgage crisis has led many U.S. consumers to believe their standard of living has not improved the past 5 years. According to a USA Today survey, 54 percent of their respondents concluded their economic well-being stagnated for the past half decade, although 45 percent were optimistic the situation would improve in the next five years. The daily's poll confirmed the earlier finding by the Pew Research Center, that, "Fewer Americans now than at any time in the last half century believe...

NEW YORK (AP) -- The U.S. financial industry has been shedding jobs at a record clip, and some analysts predict the pace will only accelerate over the next year-and-a-half as banks cut costs in the face of the housing market slump and the weak economy. Analysts at the financial research firm Celent LLC said in a report Tuesday that it expects the U.S. commercial banking industry -- essentially, all companies that lend or collect deposits -- to lose 200,000 of its 2 million jobs over the next 12 to 18 months. An annual loss of 200,000 jobs at the nation's...

WASHINGTON - Moving company Allied Van Lines Inc., along with its corporate parent Sirva Inc., filed for bankruptcy protection Tuesday, the latest victim of a heavy debt load and the downturn in the U.S. housing industry. The company, which is based in Westmont, Ill., listed assets of $924 million and debts of $1.2 billion. The company has more than 100,000 creditors. Sirva filed for Chapter 11 protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan after reaching a deal with its lenders to cut its debt by some $200 million. Under the company's "prepackaged" bankruptcy plan, Sirva's lenders will trade a portion...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Amid new worries about a possible recession, the housing slump and rising oil prices, President Bush is exploring an economic stimulus package to reinforce the U.S. economy. White House press secretary Dana Perino said Thursday that Bush is closely monitoring economic trends and is seeking input from his economic advisers on the pros and cons of such a package. "The president has indicated that he will not make up his mind as to whether or not to lay out a package until the State of the Union," Perino said about the president's speech on Jan. 28. "Our...