What we need is essentially what we once had.

Before WWII one could walk into any RR station and buy a ticket to anywhere and everywhere. If no agent was on duty in a small town, say at 3 AM, you could board the train and pay cash and ride to where there was an agent on duty. Unfolded, tickets could be quite long with a stub surrendered for every leg of a journey required different railroads or transfers.

Agents had to be quite knowlegible. He might ask you whether you wanted to go through Springfield or Lima or Indianapolis. At the worst, whether you would rather layover 4 hours in St. Louis or 3 hours in Memphis.

Of course if you wanted to go from Chicago to New York you might work all day in the Loop and catch a name train at a station a few blocks away. Wine and dine rather elegantly, play cards or visit, and sleep, arrive in New York the next morning maybe a few blocks from your meeting in midtown Manhattan or across the street from your hotel.

We don’t need super high speed trains. We need service to everywhere – like we had. Speeds of 100 mph instead of 70 mph would be great, but that’s not the issue. The priority is not three hundred mph trains for a few services.

Mr. Philips is credited with the “southern strategy” that put the GOP in power, and today he is one of their harshest critics (Wikipedia, others). You may wish to read more of his writing and influence, as The Emerging Republican Majority foretold the GOP rise, and 2006’s American Theocracy, and more recently, Bad Money (2008) speak to the meltdown, and GOP failure, that is where the US is stuck now. (Bacevich’s End of American Exceptionalism is a must, too, along with Krugman, Stiglitz, Chalmers Johnson.)

Not to diminish Eric Janszen’s writing, but I think Philips, and perhaps others, were using the FIRE term well before the Harper’s article.

I enjoy your articles–linked from energybulletin.net, and now I’ll be reading iTulip.com.