Biden Puts Us On A Fast Train To Nowhere
https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/12/biden-puts-us-on-a-fast-train-to-nowhere/
At long last, we’re building the first high-speed rail project in our nation’s history. And it’s starting here.”
That was President Joe Biden announcing last week that us taxpayers will be ponying up $3 billion to help a private company build a bullet train from Los Angeles to Las Vegas so gambleholics can start losing money more quickly.
The L.A. to Vegas train will supposedly be finished in time for the Los Angeles Summer Olympics in 2028 — just four and half years from now.
Well, anything is possible. A private company is planning to build the thing and claims to have the route and rights-of-way all figured out. But when you consider that Biden put up $7.5 billion to get private companies to put EV chargers all over the country and two years later not a single one has been built, constructing more than four miles of complex high-speed electrified rail each and every month seems a bit optimistic. (It took eight years to build an 11-mile extension to the Washington, D.C., Metro Silver Line.
But let’s say this private company can build it that fast, and that it will be a huge win for travelers, as Biden claims. Then why on Earth are taxpayers on the hook for a third of its construction costs?
What’s more, Biden’s claim that this is the “first high-speed rail project” in the country is a flat-out lie. Or did he forget about the high-speed rail project from Los Angeles to San Francisco that California has been working on since 2008 — the one that he and President Barack Obama threw $3 billion at 13 years ago?
Actually, Biden did eventually bring it up in his remarks last week (as transcribed by the White House):
Another high-speed rail project we’re announcing today is in California. Ultimately, it’s going to take folks from Los Angeles, through the Central Valley, all the way to San Francisco, b- — in less than three hours. But today, the journey can take eight hours by bus or car. Think of how this train will transform California’s Central Valley with new businesses, new residents, visitors, economic opportunities, or what it will mean to folks who live in inland towns and commute to work in Californian coastal cities. It’s a game changer.
Biden announced that he is dumping another $3.1 billion of taxpayer money into what has so far proved to be nothing more than a monument to wishful thinking and government waste.
Here’s a brief timeline of California’s slow road to high-speed rail:
- In 2008, California voters approved a nearly $10 billion bond measure to help fund construction of a high-speed rail from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
- Californians were told that construction costs would total $45 billion and that it would be up and running by 2020.
- In 2010, Obama handed the state $2.25 billion for the project, with the money coming from his failed stimulus bill. Later that year, Obama sent another $624 million California’s way.
- Over the next 13 years, the project suffered massive delays and cost overruns.
- Today, just building a 171-mile portion connecting two Central Valley towns — Merced (population of 95,000) and Bakersfield (population, 450,000) — is estimated to cost $35.3 billion.
- Biden’s $3.1 billion is supposed to finance only this section of rail, and even then California has a roughly $7 billion funding gap for this stretch in the middle of nowhere.
- To top it off, just this 171-mile section won’t be ready until 2033, at the earliest.
So here we are, 15 years after California started on its L.A.-to-San Francisco bullet train, and after some $10 billion has already been spent, and not a single mile of track has been laid.
Plus, despite what Biden said, Gov. Gavin Newsom admitted in 2019 that “there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to L.A. I wish there were.”
In short, $3 billion is going to a private company for a project the government has no business investing in, and the other $3 billion is going to a project that everyone already knows is a failure. And all this is being financed by the $1 trillion infrastructure bill that 19 brain-dead Senate Republicans voted for.
This is Bidenomics at work.
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