Liberal Logic

Liberals love government solutions:

Democrats constantly extol the virtues of high-speed rail, although, in a country as large as America, it doesn’t make much sense in most places. Arguably, one of the places it does make sense is a state with a dense population, like California. So, how has that been going? In 2008, California voters approved $9.95 billion of state bond funding as seed money to build an 800-mile high-speed rail (HSR) network connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco, and the Central Valley to coastal cities, at speeds of up to 220 miles per hour, with an expected completion date of 2020. ...But now, 15 years after the bond issue, three years after the expected completion date, not one train has left the station. Not one route has been completed, even though nearly all the $9.95 billion seed money has been spent. And the original budget of about $33 billion for the entire 800-mile system is now inadequate to build just one route (Bakersfield to Merced), whose cost pencils out to $207 million per mile—a cost that will almost certainly rise in the future, and for a route that may not be ready for ten years. Or more. Or perhaps ever. ...There is no path to completion for the fantasy rail system that was falsely sold to voters 15 years ago. Finishing the Bakersfield-Merced route, which will cost in excess of $35 billion, and which won’t be operative for ten years, doesn’t come close to penciling out. The only reasonable decision is to end a project that should never have begun. Similarly, California has one of the worst homeless problems in America and their response has largely been to bend over backward to cater to the homeless. They’ve spent 24 billion dollars doing this since 2019. So, how is this working out? Since 2019, California has spent about $24 billion on homelessness, but in this five-year period, homelessness increased by about 30,000, to more than 181,000. Put differently, California spent the equivalent of about $160,000 per person (based on the 2019 figure) over the last five years. If you want to see a similarly effective program at the federal level, Joe Biden & Kamala Harris’s 42 billion dollar attempt to roll out high-speed Internet to rural areas fits the bill: One of President Joe Biden's pledges upon entering office in 2021 was to expand Americans' access to high-speed broadband Internet. But despite apportioning tens of billions of dollars to the task, not one person has been connected to the Internet as a result of the initiative. Contained within the 2021 infrastructure bill, the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program authorized more than $42 billion in grants, to "connect everyone in America to reliable, affordable high-speed Internet by the end of the decade." "In 2021, the Biden Administration got $42.45 billion from Congress to deploy high-speed Internet to millions of Americans," Brendan Carr, the senior Republican commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter) this month. "Years later, it has not connected even 1 person with those funds. In fact, it now says that no construction projects will even start until 2025 at [the] earliest." Keep in mind, these are the people who are constantly telling you that all you need to do to fix all your problems is give the government more money and power. Yet, when the government gets more money and power, what do you get? Hot garbage.

Garbage in, garbage out...