Your eyes on California Government

John Seiler:

I’m not a fan if either candidate for governor. But for whatever reason, Meg Whitman has taken the right position on the High-Speed-Bullet-Boondoggle-Choo-Choo-Train-Scam (HSBBCCS): she’s against. And Jerry Brown, predictably, is for it, as the Mercury News notes.

Jerry is saying he supported such a scheme back in 1982, his last year as gubernador. Doesn’t that tell you something? 28 years haven’t improved the technology or the politics to make the HSBBCCS realistic, yet Gov. Moonbeam still is shooting for the moon (while mooning taxpayers).

Meg seems to be focusing her campaign on the bottom-line of the state budget. So she’s opposed because the HSBBCCS costs too much.

Gov. Arnold, predictably, favors the HSBBCCS. That figures. I’ve always said that Arnold, despite the free-market blather he spouted early in his career, really is an Austrian socialist. Austria has an expensive, tax-funded boondoggle train, so California must have one. Not that he’ll ever get out of his private jets or his Bentley (see picture at right) to ride one.

This year Gov. Arnold bragged about the $2.34 billion federal grant he got for the HSBBCCS. But he didn’t note that the grant was part of, as the Obama White House’s press release put it, “awarding $8 billion to states across the country to develop America’s first nationwide program of high-speed intercity passenger rail service.  Funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), these dollars represent an historic investment in the country’s transportation infrastructure, which will help create jobs and transform travel in America.”

“create jobs” — what nonsense. They’re just shuffling our tax money around to special-interest groups.

Now, California is 12% of the country. So of that $8 billion in the federal boondoggle, about $1 billion comes from California taxpayers. And that’s just one part of the usual logrolling deals made in Congress.

Moreover, it’s likely the technology for the train mostly will come from foreign countries. So, we’re just shipping California tax money to other states and foreign countries!

Looks like the train, like 19th century trains, will be built by the Chinese — but this time they’re not coolies, but Communist Chinese high-tech capitalist train firms:

The Chinese government has signed cooperation agreements with the State of California and General Electric to help build such lines. The agreements, both of which are preliminary, show China’s desire to become a big exporter and licensor of bullet trains traveling 215 miles an hour, an environmentally friendly technology in which China has raced past the United States in the last few years.

Ain’t life ironic? The way things are going, Americans soon will be reverse-coolies, moving to China to provide the manual labor to build their trains.

Of course, another irony is that America already has high-speed bullet trains that can go more than twice the speed of the Chinese bullet trains. Our bullet trains can take you from Los Angeles to Sacramento or San Fran in less than an hour. Indeed, our America high-tech bullet trains are so far advanced of anything the foreigners make that ours can fly.

They’re called airplanes.