Dying Cities, Air Travel, and Politics

Some may remember a post I made a while back ago about the decay happening in the Rustbelt.

Here's a different take on endangered cities from EnvironmentalGraffiti.com. The city that I'm most immediately concerned about? Here it is:

5. Atlanta

We may have gotten a preview of the untenable expansion the capital city of the south has undertaken with the drought that dominated 2007, and will be felt through 2008 despite above-average rainfall so far. Being located in an area that is far away from any large water source may eventually force Atlanta to scale back, and climate change, as it takes hold, will only complicate matters, transforming the greenest city in America into a semi-desert environment.

Of course, there was tons of news about Atlanta's water crisis at the end of last year, and it's not much of a leap to also become concerned about Phoenix. Not just because of the water issues, but because of the continually-increasing costs of gasoline and the effect that this is having on our far-flung suburbs.

Gas prices are only going to climb higher, and nobody is really realizing that it means we won't be able to drive as far anymore, so one way or another, everything is going to have to be much more localized around hubs of commerce and housing.

Those hubs - perhaps "Edge Cities" as Joel Garreau puts it, will need to be connected in some manner that doesn't rely on the personal automobile to get us around.

Our air transportation system is also really hurting, when the only thing these companies can do to save themselves is to merge and create less competition in the midst of soaring jet fuel costs. But this really isn't a solution - and the government contributes to the problem by continuing to approve these mergers and simply displaying the shortsightedness that gets these politicians elected.

The Practical Nomad has this to say about the relationship between the government and the airlines. Highlights from this thoughtful article:

• "Air travellers in the USA get the worst of all worlds: prices artificially inflated by protectionism, taxes increased to support government subsidies, exemption of the airlines from state and local consumer protection laws, and a hands-off attitude by the Federal government towards even the most egregious violations by the airlines of existing federal consumer fraud and truth-in-advertising laws."

• "It's the government of the USA, and airlines based in the USA, that are whining self-righteously about "open skies", "free markets", and the "unfair" protectionism of other countries' reciprocal restrictions on access to their much smaller, much less significant, domestic airline markets. Like so much else the airlines are saying in their quest for even more special treatment and subsidies from governments, it's pure hypocrisy, motivated by pure greed."
  

• "It's particularly unfair that taxpayers are required to subsidize air travel -- directly and indirectly -- more than such other means of transportation as Amtrak trains or public mass transportation. Ordinary people in the USA could afford to travel more by air, especially internationally, but they don't. Outside of a small "jet set", most people in the USA do their regular travelling by land, and fly only rarely. Most air travellers [sic] are relatively wealthy. Government subsidies to air travel are among the most regressive taxes in the USA."

• If airlines want true deregulation, they should accept truly open skies, including abolition of the restrictions on cabotage and foreign ownership, and truly free markets, including an end to government subsidies and bailouts. If, on the other hand, airlines want governments (i.e. taxpayers) to underwrite their continued operations, and grant them special privileges, they should accept a reinstatement of government regulation of prices and services (i.e. a return to regulation), to ensure that they use those government subsidies, and exercise those special privileges, in the public interest.

This is another example of how bad government policy continues to actively harm people. Barack Obama, of course, points out an example of this when he criticizes Hillary Clinton's idea of a gas tax holiday as nothing more than a political gimmick that won't work. Unfortunately, the media are really not holding Clinton's (and McCain's) feet to the fire with this as they both gang up on Obama.

Why isn't Obama perceived to be electable? Because he does not offer bumper-sticker solutions or soundbites. One one level, this may be a failure on his part to communicate, but the forces are massed against anyone who does not feed people the pablum of easy answers - people who refuse to take part in what amounts to a gigantic Ponzi scheme, staying out of trouble by fooling enough people.

This may tell us is that the only really electable people in our political system today are those who basically perpetuate the status quo, keeping the country one step ahead of disaster and do only a minimally-acceptable job. Just enough to keep people from rioting in the streets.

That day may be coming sooner than all of us think.