Category: Policy

I sent this to the St. Pete Times as a letter to the editor, but apparently they have declined to publish it.  So, I have edited and published the letter here.

This letter is a response to the Tampa-Orlando high-speed rail project, which you can read about here.

The Tampa-Orlando Train Will Not Work – Even for Me

I live in South Tampa, and my girlfriend is in school at UCF.  Almost every weekend, one of us makes the one hundred five mile drive on Friday afternoon, to return Saturday night or Sunday morning.  Even if there was high-speed rail, neither of us would use it for the trip, because the rail cannot be priced low enough for either of us to ride it.

The cost of driving one way from my place to her place is roughly $100, taking the IRS’s fifty cents a mile (high for my car), adding two hours of my time valued at $20/hour, finishing with the tolls on SR417 and SR408.

The closest termination point in Tampa is downtown for me, and the Orlando Airport for her.  I live eight miles from the Amtrack station downtown, which means that trip is $4 plus fifteen minutes of my time ($5).  UCF is twenty-three miles from the airport ($11.50) plus thirty minutes ($10), plus tolls ($2.50).  But remember, someone must drop me off at the train station in Tampa, and my girlfriend must pick me up from the station at the airport, so those two trips must be made both ways, giving a total of $66.

For the train to be worth it for me, the journey would have to be Star Trek transporter instant, and cost less than $34, with no waiting time on either end.  If you assume that the waiting time and travel time together is two hours, then the public must pay me six dollars to take the train instead of driving.

All of that assumes that I have no value for the flexibility that driving gives me, being able to leave and arrive when I want instead of when the train schedule dictates.  It also assumes I have no value for having a car in Orlando, or have any value for the extra cargo-capacity of my car.

If the two cities in question are New York and Boston, or London and Paris, then the train makes sense.  However, you will have to point a gun to my head for me pay for a train between Tampa and UCF instead of driving, which is exactly what the government is doing to build the thing.  Once the thing is built, and no one rides it, what’s next?  Higher car taxes and massive tolls on I-4 to force us to ride it?… high taxes to build public transportation in Orlando and Tampa to make the train usable?… or simply high ongoing taxes to pay for a train no one rides?

Even if the high-speed rail is built with Federal dollars, and even if it brings jobs to the state, it would be much better to take the money and pay construction workers to tear down half of Westshore and rebuild it, exactly as it is now.  At least then, our tax dollars would not be perpetually drained to pay the ongoing maintenance on a train no one rides.  Or, if you must do something useful with the money, widen I-75 to eight lanes from Naples to the Georgia border.

On the surface, the Fairness Doctrine seems like a good idea: if you present a controversial issue, you need to present a fair treatment of the issue and present both sides of the debate. If the public hears both sides of the issue, goes the logic of the doctrine, they can form a better opinion. Furthermore, the argument continues, the fairness doctrine prevents media owners (or managers) from advocating their own political agendas at the cost of public debate.

However, like most public policy, the unintended consequences of the Fairness Doctrine undermine its intended purpose and cause perverse effects that are more harmful than the problem the doctrine was instituted to fix. The two major ways the Fairness Doctrine stifles free speech are 1) opportunity cost and 2) chill of potential prosecution.

Opportunity cost is simply what you give up in order to pursue a given activity. For example, the opportunity cost of me writing this blog is me playing World of Warcraft – the activity I forgo in order to explain the Fairness Doctrine.

In the case of radio shows, there is only so much time in a given radio show (or in a given day if you say the show could just expand to add additional commentary). In order to present a “fair presentation” of an issue (say, the Iraq invasion), a radio host can must cut in half the ten minutes he wanted to spend explaining what a bad idea it was, and give five minutes to a “pro-war” expert. The extra five minutes he might have spent clarifying his point are now quashed.

Furthermore, radio outlets are businesses – there to make money. A radio host once might simply shoot his mouth off for ten minutes about the stupidity of the invasion. Now he must expend the resources to find a “counter point expert” for his show (and pay said expert), resulting in a drier, less appealing (less money making) show. If the alternative is to mouth off about the stupidity of Lindsay Lohan’s latest escapade, needing no additional expert and creating a more appealing ten minutes of commentary, which is he going to choose (at least at the margin)?

Now, look at the station manager’s point of view. If his radio jockey “pushes the envelope” on this, he may have to pay the very real costs of dealing with the FCC. He is much more likely to tell his radio jockeys to “stay away from politics”, and he will choose non-political programming over political programming at the margin. Thus political speech the would have happened absent regulation is quashed.

The function of radio today is not so much to hold public debate; the function of radio is to spark it. The major effect of the Fairness Doctrine is to stifle public debate about issues, since fewer issues can be addressed due to time restraints, fewer people want to listen, and the threat of potential litigation causes risk-averse broadcasters (who are trying to make money) to avoid controversy (at least at the margin).

PS: I did a quick search, and the Cato Institute has a similar article that is likely clearer than mine.

Did you know that when the government subsidizes drug costs (especially through Medicaid and Medicare), it raises the price for the rest of us? This is why.

Look at a drug under patent. The company producing that drug has a monopoly for the drug, and prices the drug accordingly by setting the quantity where marginal cost equals the marginal revenue.

In the United States, however, the government has responded to political pressure about the high costs of prescription drugs by subsidizing drugs, usually by purchasing large amounts (through Medicaid) or, more recently, subsidizing insurance companies that provide prescription drugs under a Medicare program. This raises the demand for the patented (or orphaned) drug in question. The monopoly chooses to sell more of the drug at a higher price. People who are ineligible for the subsidized medicines are forced to pay a price for the drug that is higher than the price that they would pay if the government did not subsidize the drug.

Clearly, the Drug companies would welcome such purchasing subsidies, and clearly, if a person is not receiving subsidies, then the cost of the subsidy is not only the government outlays of the subsidy, but also the higher price paid by unsubsidized citizens.