By The Herald Editorial Board
Today’s sign that things really are getting closer to normal after more than a year of pandemic caution, cutbacks and social-distancing: Calls of “All aboard!” are again being heard daily from Amtrak passenger trains at Everett Station.
With Amtrak ridership down as much as 97 percent in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the publicly supported passenger rail system drastically cut back daily service to hundreds of stations nationwide last June, and with those route reductions more than 1,200 of its employees were furloughed.
Timed with the nation’s gradual economic reboot — courtesy of steadily increasing vaccine distribution — Amtrak announced a phased full restoration of daily service for 12 of its most popular long-distance routes, including an expansion of service for the Empire Builder route to and from Everett from three days a week to seven, daily inbound and outbound. The Empire Builder route connects the West Coast to Chicago.
Aboard for one segment of the Empire Builder’s short trip from Seattle to Everett last Thursday were Amtrak President Stephen Gardner and U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., a senior member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.
“It’s important that we’re back in these markets and creating a good opportunity as the nation goes back to travel,” Gardner said from the Everett Station platform.
Ridership numbers had already been coming back slowly, hitting about 50 percent from the earlier lows, and are expected to climb more quickly with the full resumption of schedules and a renewed interest in travel among the public, he said.
Along with the expanded schedule, Amtrak’s trains are resuming amenities that many enjoy as part of train travel, including communal services, such as shared dining and observation cars. (Federal law and Amtrak policy still requires use of face masks on trains and in stations, regardless of vaccination status or state law.)
Among the restored train routes serving Washington state are the Coast Starlight, serving cities between Seattle and Los Angeles; and the Cascades, connecting Seattle and Eugene, Ore. Until the U.S.-Canadian border is reopened, the Cascades route will use bus service to connect Bellingham and Seattle, with stops at Mount Vernon, Stanwood and Everett.
With the restoration of its routes and schedules, Amtrak is calling back 1,200 employees, including 94 in Washington state, Gardner said. The restoration of service and the rehiring of employees was aided by the passage in March of President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, with support for Amtrak and state-supported routes, such as the Cascades route.
Larsen noted the importance of the resumption of routes as well as the rehiring of workers.
“Transportation means jobs here in the Northwest, so this investment in Amtrak and other parts of the transportation system is about economic recovery and opportunity,” Larsen said. “And it gives us a chance to pull carbon emissions out of the transportation sector and contribute to the fight against climate change.”
Even greater opportunities for jobs, infrastructure investments and real solutions to climate change are now in negotiation among members of Congress and the Biden administration regarding the president’s American Jobs Plan, which seeks an expansion of public spending on infrastructure beyond traditional transportation needs to include water and sewer systems, broadband internet service, housing, veterans’ hospitals, schools and child care facilities, green energy — including electric vehicles and charging stations — and research and development.
The White House and Republicans in Congress, however, remain at odds over how “infrastructure” is defined, what it should cost and how to pay for it.
Biden started at $2.25 trillion in new spending in the jobs plan, but following calls for bipartisan negotiation, Biden reduced the package to about $1.7 trillion. In their most recent counter-offer, Republicans have offered a total of $928 billion in spending, but that figure includes a significant amount of spending already outlined for existing programs, with additional spending totaling only a fraction of Biden’s proposal at $257 billion, much of it concentrated on highways, bridges and water projects.
To pay for the investments in the jobs plan and Biden’s other major proposal, the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan, Biden has promoted two paths:
• Hiring and other spending for the Internal Revenue Service to boost its collection of owed but unpaid taxes, particularly among the richest Americans, which the White House estimates could bring in $700 billion over 10 years; and
• An increase in the corporate tax rate to 28 percent from the 21 percent level that Republicans set with the tax cuts they adopted in 2017 without Democratic support.
Republicans, to pay for the investments they seek, have proposed no new taxes and instead have suggested diverting unspent money from the American Rescue Plan.
Negotiations have come down to arguments over Biden’s “go big or go home” approach and Republicans’ “read my lips; no new taxes.”
Recent polling shows a majority of the public siding with Biden on both the spending and on how to pay for it:
• A mid-April Marist poll, conducted for NPR and the PBS News Hour, found that 56 percent of those polled supported Biden’s American Jobs Plan at its full $2.25 trillion in spending; and 65 percent favored a proposed tax increase for those making more than $400,000 a year.
• A more recent poll, by Data for Progress and Invest in America, found 58 percent support among voters for both Biden’s American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan; and 63 percent support for increasing the corporate tax rate. Only 22 percent supported using unspent pandemic relief funds and an increase of fees to pay for improvements. As well, even 52 percent of Republican voters polled expressed support for Biden’s tax proposal.
When given a choice between the spending packages, 51 percent of voters opted for Biden’s plan, while 32 percent backed the Republican plan.
Congress should note the convincing public support for Biden’s plans and for the realistic — and fair — sources of revenue that he has identified.
Bipartisanship should always be the starting point from which these and other discussions start, but — as shown by Friday’s move by Senate Republicans to block a bipartisan commission’s investigation of the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riots — comity between the two parties can’t be favored over action needed in the country and supported by Americans.
Democrats have the option — as they did with the American Rescue Plan — of using budget reconciliation to bypass Senate Republicans’ filibuster to adopt the president infrastructure proposals. If an agreement cannot be reached soon, Democrats should move forward.
And Republicans — as many did in boasting about what the American Rescue Plan brought to their constituents, even after voting against it — will be welcome to join in when Biden calls “All aboard!”
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