In the Republicans’ defense, they’re working from a complete ignorance of macroeconomics (or hell, even microeconomics), having all paid for their houses in cash or something. Anytime I see a politician talking about the deficit or debt (which are constantly conflated) I have to stifle an angry rant that invariably ends with me denouncing anyone with a law degree, which isn’t fare, but as someone with some experience in both economics and geophysical modeling my tolerance for conservative think tanks and Republican lawmakers is constantly hitting rock-bottom, and then dropping though another layer of the Earth’s mantle.
Although I know CREATE is a pretty forward-thinking program, there have to be other public-private freight railway investments earmarked around the country. I wonder if they’ve been affected in the same way or if there’s any correlation between the partisan makeup of the region and how much was cut. If there were a stronger Republican Party presence in northern Illinois, this might not have happened. And of course, all this comes with the caveat that this was by the House in the hope of forcing a government shutdown, so at this point no one knows how everything will pan out. I cant help but agree with
Robert Longworth here: “whatever our representatives in Congress are doing, they aren't earning their pay.”
Still, this has a sick irony for anyone who knows American history. Although I couldn’t find it online, I’ve seen versions of the map below that were used as nineteenth-century Democratic political propaganda about how the Republicans sold our country’s bounteous agrarian future to the greedy railroad industrialists: