Posted on 05/04/2018 3:23:08 PM PDT by MarvinStinson
Let me just say from the outset that I still miss California. When I see news about my former state, it’s like reading the details of a train wreck after having safely disembarked a comfortable time ago.
I and my family got to live in Orange County for seven glorious years and another year in the Bay Area when the state was not convulsed with insanity on stilts.
It was sunny nearly every day, with low humidity. There were no bugs. Our local amusement parks were Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm. We did, as Californians are fond of boasting, go to the beach and then later that day drive up into snow-covered mountains just to say we did.
The Sunday edition of the Los Angeles Times, for which I worked as a news editor at the time, was so big and fat with ads that Times staffers swore that a deliveryman in Beverly Hills once hit a chihuahua with a paper, killing it.
Which brings us to something entirely implausible — the state-of-the-art bullet train, now under construction. Somehow, we got along fine without a bullet train from Los Angeles to San Francisco. A maniacal pipe dream of Gov. Jerry Brown, its price tag was increased last week to $77.3 billion. The train’s projected opening date has been pushed back another four years, to 2033.
When this thing is done, they claim, you will be able to zip between Southern California and Baghdad by the Bay in only three hours. Minus any time spent restoring track after a particularly bad earthquake.
Of course, you can get to Frisco faster if you hop on one of the many daily flights from LAX to San Francisco International Airport or vice versa. And by the time the railroad opens up, we might even be able to beam there, courtesy of Cal Tech and other brainy places.
Meanwhile, California is in the midst of yet another fiscal crisis. It’s fast becoming the mother of all welfare magnet states while welcoming a surge in illegal immigration. In January, Gov. Brown announced a $1.6 billion deficit by next summer. The total estimated public debt of the Golden State is $1.3 trillion.
What a curious time to throw billions at a train to the future. Can you imagine how many fares it would take to recoup even a microscopic fraction of the expense? Even if passengers jump aboard and pack the roof like on the trains in Calcutta.
The cost alone is so staggering that it defies perspective. But here’s some. The Big Dig, the fabulously costly patronage highway project in Boston that began construction in 1991 and opened in 1998, cost $22 billion, including interest. That’s nearly 10 times the initial projected cost of $2.8 billion.
In 2006, a main artery of the system was named for Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr., the former Democratic U.S. speaker of the House, who used his enormous influence to secure federal tax dollars.
The “Chunnel,” the English Channel tunnel that has connected Great Britain and France since 1994, cost only $21 billion. The Large Hadron “Super” Collider, which opened near Geneva, Switzerland, in 2009 and measures particles traveling at nearly the speed of light, cost a mere $6 billion. Even the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, cost only $4.5 billion to $6 billion.
California’s fiscal folly would be laughable if everything that started in California did not wind up on our doorsteps from Alaska to Georgia. In what may be a harbinger for advancing illegal immigration, just this past week, state Senate President pro tem Kevin de Leon, Los Angeles Democrat, named the first illegal alien to occupy a state office, a student grant advisory committee.
California has 40 million people, more than a tenth of the U.S. population, and 53 members of Congress. Its economy is the sixth largest, at $2.4 trillion GDP (in 2015), behind the United States, China, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom and just above France and Brazil, according to International Monetary Fund figures crunched by the Brown administration.
Its politicians stride across the national stage as larger-than-life figures. Think of Ronald Reagan and Nancy Pelosi. Reagan is best known for winning the Cold War and restoring America’s confidence and prosperity. But that was yesterday. Today, well, Mrs. Pelosi, the current House Minority Leader, was boasting last week about being a judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race All-Stars show. That’s where men who dress like women compete in various events.
“This idea of people believing in themselves, being themselves, taking pride in themselves, is not just a lesson for politicians but for everyone in the country,” Mrs. Pelosi told the Hollywood Reporter.
California — a train wreck in progress. It’s impossible to look away.
Your are ABSOLUTELY correct! His education leaks out all over everything he says and does. How sad he was a complete
Jebbie Kool-Aid drinker!
GOT TO LIVE!!!!
We all gotta live!!!! :)
“Nothing stays the same and the liberal control of CA is changing and in decline as well, IMHO.”
I really hope you’re right.
I also wish we’d spent this money on reservoirs and water collection. We have MUCH bigger problems than lack of trains.
i agree. there will be water wars.
They don't do anything they should. Their heads are up their asses and they've made a lot of folks mighty angry. It's like the state is run by some liberal raving sociology professors living off grants. They don't give two sh*tholes about what's good for the citizens of CA. I'd guess many of those running the state government are mentally ill and the rest simply have motives of bad intent. No joke. They've become a public embarrassment, an ugly spectacle to most of the country and a good portion of those in the state itself.
My hunch is the jig is almost up up for these stooges. It might take a few more years, but I see it and hear it trending. I can almost feel it! War drums.☺
” Can you imagine how many fares it would take to recoup even a microscopic fraction of the expense? Even if passengers jump aboard and pack the roof like on the trains in Calcutta.”
Yeah, at 200 mph, that would be something to see! But not as bad as a seat on the wing of a jet!
“They don’t give two sh*tholes about what’s good for the citizens of CA. “
Yes, thanks. I just think that they could have made/spent just as much money for all their union construction buddies, but actually done something meaningful by building water storage and aqueducts. Such a waste.
“Nothing stays the same and the liberal control of CA is changing and in decline as well, IMHO. “
As a life-long Californian, like you I am seeing the first vestiges of the decline here. Even the Liberals are beginning to see that the Mexican invasion is a bad idea. But the thing that’s going to sink the RATs here is the mounting debt. They are in the pockets of the unions, and that will ultimately be their undoing when they are no longer able to pass out the goodies to the PE’s, Teachers and Nurses. Pensions will HAVE to have big haircuts. They claim that a state can’t go bust under the Constitution, but you are defacto broke when no one will do business with you because you can’t pay them. I hope the first thing to go is the toilet paper in the capitol bathrooms. Brown should actually be kissing Trump’s a$$ because the rebounding economy in the country is giving him a little room to breathe. A couple more years of “The Obola Economy,” and it would have already been over.
Brown is on the far-right of today’s Cali democratic party.
It’s so funny I forgot to laugh.
>>>This is how a news editor writes?!?<<<
Celebrate Dyslexia...
not a chance. Too many foreign buyers with large money from Iran (LA) China (SFO/SoCal) India (Bay Area) and Vietnam (Central Valley/Imperial Valley). As long as the foreign money flows, housing will go up and up and up, the poor are displaced to the woods up north or out to the upper desert down south.
Along with the influx of foreign money comes values - those who’ve ‘made it’ (to America) don’t want to deal with homeless, or illegals, in their new Utopia. That isn’t the quality of life they came here to enjoy. The blacks have been displaced from LA by hispanics, who will be displaced in turn by money.
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