Libertarians: Always Ready to “Help”.

OK, so tomorrow is the big day. And starting first thing Monday morning, it’ll be a whole new ballgame. The truth is, no one has the foggiest idea what to expect. Passenger rail advocates have been nervously staring into space for weeks with little if any clue what the Trump administration is thinking, let along what they might actually do.
 
There was a burst of optimism when The Donald said there would be a one trillion dollar plan to repair and improve the country’s infrastructure. But now The Hill is reporting word from the Trump camp that there’s talk of cutting more than ten trillion dollars from the federal budget over the next 10 years. 
It didn’t take analysts very long to note a remarkable similarity between the budget being developed by the Trump people and numbers proposed by the Heritage Foundation. What a shock! And why are we not surprised that this Libertarian “think tank” recommends, among all the cost cutting, the elimination of any federal dollars for Amtrak? (Translation: they want to kill Amtrak.)
 
Where the hell do these people get off, anyway—the Freedom Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation and others—many, even most, generously funded by the Kochs and all pushing a political ideology that invariably hurts the working class?
 
And as always, at the top of their hit list is anything that has steel wheels running on steel rails. Any new rail project that comes along will start them all baying if there’s a nickel of federal money involved. They’ll get one of their so-called analysts to recycle an old ”study” that says the project will be a financial disaster. The media will pick that up, the letters-to-the-editor from the NIMBYs will start, and then the politicians will start to have second thoughts.
 
And here they come after Amtrak again, this time with the Republicans running things! We’re ready and willing to do battle. But it’s going to be a long goddam four years.