President Obama is pushing high speed rail in his most recent budget. What he, or his lackies in the state-run media, won't tell you is that the high speed rail isn't really high speed at all. At best, it'll only reach 80 mph, and won't be European-style speeds and it will be unable to match the efficiency of our highway system. [PDF of an exhaustive study by Oak Ridge Laboratories]
Hard on the heels of his speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in which he jawboned the owners of private businesses to increase hiring in return for federal tax breaks and other subsidies, President Obama has included in his budget request for fiscal year 2012 a proposal to make a $8 billion down payment on a six-year, $53 billion taxpayer-financed “investment” in high-speed rail.
Last night, on the John Batchelor Show, the topic was delved into a bit more deeply (along with other California issues), and here is the audio of some of that conversation:
Wednesday 935P Eastern Time (635P Pacific Time): Hotel California. Nunes (CA-21); Jeff Bliss, The Bliss Index; David Drucker, Roll Call, in re: Jerry Brown has ordered a hiring freeze except for a few core functions (emergency response and the like). Diane Feinstein, Barbara Boxer: concerned? Unh, hard to say. No visible (audible) solution yet. Congress is so caught up in its own problems that it hasn't yet started to hector the states. High-speed rail: $53bil. Was supposed to go from San Francisco to San Diego, but right now it's planned to be a few miles within the San Joaquin Valley, running from a dairy town to a viticultural center (pop. 543,000). Economically nuts. Republicans and a bunch of Democrats view it as a boondoggle. california actually has $2.5 bil that it's obliged to spend on high-speed rail; tomorrow, Devin Nunes will introduce a bill allowing California to move the money to widen a dangerous road (Bakersfield to Sacramento), major artery in the largest agricultural region in the world. The only people who want this not-very-high-speed rail are companies that stand to make a killing. If we had 150 states in the Union and each one could return billions of dollars, we'd have enough to complete the California high-speed tracks.
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