Greenhut dissects High-Speed Rail boondoggle
April 9, 2012
By John Seiler
Writing on Bloomberg, our Contributing Editor Steven Greenhut dissects the latest shenanigans in the High-Speed Rail boondoggle. An excerpt:
The California High-Speed Rail Authority has a serious public-relations hurdle: how to sell its proposed Los Angeles-to-San Francisco bullet train without the word “boondoggle” attached.
But the rail authority’s latest compromise plan to solve this problem — with its focus on building the system in a“better, faster, cheaper” manner — not only doesn’t fix the system’s fundamental flaws, it may plant the seeds of its destruction….
Governor Jerry Brown and Democratic leaders claim that not building the system is more costly than building it (based on inflated estimates of coming transportation needs), so they continue to move forward — pushing out the authority’s old leadership and making changes that claim to slash $30 billion in costs and that would link the Central Valley to Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. Critics argue that the savings seem to have magically appeared — without sufficient detail explaining where they will come from.
Read the rest here.
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The courts should throw out Prop 1A since it was predicated upon a pack of lies. Based on the faulty (I think intentionally faulty) cost estimates alone it should not be allowed to legally stand. It’s no less fraudulent than the classic ‘bait and switch’ scams that you hear about. The integrity of a democratic republic is based on the premise that voters can be confident that ballot measures contain truthful and factual information. Otherwise the entire system is a racket and a farce. If they keep this crap up the County Registar of Voters will have to serve cavier and other delicacies at the polls just to coax people to show up and vote – just like they had to do in the old Soviet Union. It’s disgraceful that this deceit and tawdry behavior is acceptable within our ballot system
So true, Beelzebub. Without trust, we will have no society. This is unbelievable and this is happening in the USA. I’m disgusted with these spineless politicians who will not uphold the law, primarily because they will be bucking the top guy and no doubt are thinking such a move would be a career killer. Whatever happened to ethics?