Except for those getting the cash, just about every analyst of the California High-Speed Rail Authority says it’s a boondoggle. Dan Walters summed it up:

It’s rare for any human endeavor to achieve perfection, but California’s High-Speed Rail Authority has done it – albeit in reverse.

Every single independent review of its project to link the northern and southern halves of the state with a bullet train has concluded that it’s not working. No exceptions. Not even one.

The only ones saying that the bullet train will work as promised are the rail authority itself, its highly paid consultants and media cheerleaders, and those on the political left who hate cars and planes and love trains.

Is that enough to stop the funding? Of course not. This is California, the land of delusions.

Reported Capitol Weekly:

By fits and starts, amid fights over routes and funding, construction on California’s bullet train remains on track to begin next year….

The project has so far received $3.5 billion in federal aid, taken from other states that had cancelled their own high-speed train projects. The federal government has promised a total of $19 billion in aid, 40 percent of every available high-speed rail dollar in the country.

Keep that in mind when you hear talk in the current budget battles in Washington about increasing taxes or the government will default. If they canceled the stupid high-speed choo-choo, they could save that $19 bil, plus interest.

And that’s just one example. The whole, $4 trillion federal budget is riddled with just such waste for every state and congressional district — and for every territory and imperial outpost. Government exists to waste.

But the political cultures in both the federal and state capitols now are so corrupt that they are impervious to reform. The only reason the state government of California isn’t heading to bankruptcy is because it can’t print its own money, so budget cuts have been made.

The Feds, by contrast, have been printing money like crazy, driving down the value of the dollar in a de facto default.

July 28, 2011