California’s high-speed rail project is and always has been an expensive and unworkable scam. The project was sold to voters in 2008 as a $33 billion plan connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco. And, it was supposed to be operational in 2020. Here we are in 2024, with a higher price tag (upwards of $128 billion) and no one can quite say when the system will be done.
“As it does every year in March, the High-Speed Rail Authority (HSRA) released its draft business blueprint,” noted Sen. Roger Niello, R-Roseville, in a recent commentary for the Southern California News Group. “At a recent legislative informational hearing, HSRA officials stated another $100 billion is needed before connecting riders across the state, but they have no formal plan as to how and from where they will raise that money.”
And as usual, the HSRA is busy touting how many jobs the project has created. On Tuesday, the HSRA issued a press release “[celebrating] the creation of more than 13,000 construction jobs helping build the nation’s first high-speed rail system, with more than 70 percent of those jobs going to residents of California’s Central Valley.”
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That’s nice and all, but the press release brings to mind an old story about the great economist Milton Friedman visiting a canal project in Asia. Friedman wondered why workers were using shovels instead of land-moving machines. Told that the project was a jobs program, Friedman replied, “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”
When a slight majority (52.6%) of California voters approved $9.95 billion in general obligation bonds for the project through Proposition 1A in 2008, they probably expected to be riding the promised high-speed rail line by now. Instead, they get to read about the peripheral benefits of pouring billions of dollars into a project that’s now $100 billion short and without a tangible plan for completion.
“Let’s be real,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in 2019. “The project, as currently planned, would cost too much and take too long. There’s been too little oversight and not enough transparency.”
That’s still true and always will be. It’s time to be real and end the project.