The Washington DC region has a subway system referred to as the “Metro.” It’s designed to bring government bureaucrats into the District. There they push paper, write regulations, fight social injustice and otherwise annoy productive taxpayers.
At the close of the business day (anywhere from noon to five, depending on the bureaucrat) the Metro returns them to the suburbs where they moved to avoid living in the type of environment government bureaucrats create.
Today Metro is in trouble. Ridership is down 15 percent in the last year alone and the system’s budget assumes it will decline an additional 5 percent from its 2009 peak during the next fiscal year. Normally this would mean uncrowded cars and plenty of room to stretch out for the remaining passengers, but that’s not the case here.
Since Metro is unionized and governed by a board of politicians, the operating philosophy has been keep wages high and maintenance expense low. If the Metro board had been running a cab company it would have paid Clinton Foundation salaries while not bothering to change the oil.
That’s why Metro is broken. Entire lines are shutdown for long overdue repair. Metro is cutting the number of trains during the day, reducing the speed on trains that do run, closing stations and packing the remaining riders into the cars it can keep on the tracks.
Metro is well on its way to being the world’s first by–appointment–only subway system.
It’s a bad situation that inspires equally bad thinking.
What type of bad thinking? The kind only found among dreamy leftists looking to be rescued from the results of their own incompetence. Details, as always, in my Newsmax.com column.
Michael R. Shannon (The Whole Shebang (mostly)) is a Virginia-based public relations and media consultant with MANDATE: Message, Media & Public Relations who has worked in over 75 elections on three continents and a handful of islands.
