A Different Look at the Stimulus

Bill Lever, commenting at Don Surber's site, has some sobering statistics about freight traffic on railroads that will tell you how well the stimulus is working:

Let’s look at some hard statistics on how that stimulus is doing.

The American Association of Railroads provides a weekly rail carloading report and compares it to the prior year.

It is available at http://railfax.transmatch.com/ (THE LINK):
18.8% of all U.S. rail traffic has disappeared since last year.

A train 100 cars long last year is only 81 cars long this year.

49.6% of automobile cargo has disappeared.

48.0% of metals traffic is gone

27.8% of forest products traffic is gone.

Even food being moved is 11.0% less than last year

It’s astonishing. The number of loaded train cars moving around is a pretty good indicator of economic activity.

It’s hard to put a positive spin on shorter trains.

Maybe the government should just decree that empty cars have to keep moving to keep up appearances. Think Potemkin trainloads.

An awful lot of stuff moves around this country by rail, and if it's not moving it's because nobody's buying it.

Despite Newsweek's cheery optimism about the recession being over, I think there is still some pain to come.