Photo by URBANDOGGS

This week, Congress is locked in one of the most important legislative debates of the year: whether to raise the country’s debt limit, cut spending, or risk defaulting on our debt. With the nation’s economic future very much in the balance, it’s the perfect time to make radical policy proposals that the rest of the country will be too distracted to properly analyze or process. Proposals like killing Amtrak, for instance.

Apparently Congressman Bill Shuster (R-PA), chairmen of the House subcommittee on rail, argued in a hearing last week that Congress should strip Amtrak of its control over the Northeast Corridor. And since the rest of the system is subsidized by a combination of Northeast Corridor revenues and taxpayer dollars, such a move would basically gut Amtrak and force the government to sell the system’s various track, rolling stock and right-of-way to a series of private investors or regional private-public partnerships. House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica (R-FL) explained how this would work in the Northeast Corridor:

We plan to introduce legislation to separate the Northeast Corridor from Amtrak, transfer it to a separate entity, and begin a competitive bidding process that would allow for a public-private partnership to design, build, operate, maintain and finance high-speed service,” Mica said in a news release. “Our plan would do so in a dramatically shorter time, in closer to 10 rather than 30 years, and at a fraction of the $117 billion cost proposed by Amtrak, while creating new jobs.

Now, it’s unclear what the Republican “plan” is exactly. From the sounds of it, Mica and Shuster are working off of the assumption that there’s enough of an economic incentive to develop high-speed rail in the region to spur private development along the entirety of the Northeast Corridor. But even with government footing at least some of the costs (perhaps through a public-private funding scheme akin to William Galston’s national infrastructure bank) private investors would have to shell out tens of billions of dollars in developing the high-speed rail line. And they’d be buying into a mode of transportation that hasn’t been profitable in this country for decades. The idea that private industry will spend anywhere in the neighborhood of $117 billion to develop high speed rail at least seems like wishful thinking.

But what if it isn’t? High-speed rail advocates like claiming that passenger lines will eventually clear their startup costs. If that’s usually the case, does it really matter how active a role government is playing the development of these rail lines? And more importantly, wouldn’t major private investment in the country’s flagship rail line help settle the profitability debate once and for all?

Clearly stripping Amtrak of its control over the Northeast Corridor is a radical move that would wreck America’s existing passenger rail system. Breaking up Amtrak would be rash and, in the short run, highly irresponsible. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t alternatives to Amtrak. And it certainly doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be explored.