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.
bmp
Good luck to all FReepers and like souls. Cali is interesting to watch from afar.
The government spending rule of 10’s.
Any government project will cost 10 times as much as originally estimated.
Corrolary:
This also applies to revised estimates.
That's why I'm staying. I have no desire to give up the best to settle for less.
I'll stay and continue to operate behind enemy lines. And FWIW, it's my opinion the leftist in CA have over played their hands with their anti-American lunatic policies. The worm is turning.☺
With open borders cheap labor express and gullible Republicans as much to blame as any democrat for the influx from the south, thank you very much. GWB is as much to blame as Brown, arguably Brown is the symptom.
Either the Trump Administration comes to our rescue here in occupied California or they are no better than the dingbats in Sacramento. And anyone suggesting that my family and I leave, F.O.A.D. along with their entire bloodline- *we* didn’t turn this state into a pseudo third world hellhole, the last three Republican presidents let the camel not only get its nose under the tent but mate and reproduce.
Old senile Marxist Jesuit
Not a blog; first published at the Washington Times:
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/mar/18/the-great-california-train-wreck/
I lived in Cali for ten years 2005-15. And despite its very real weirdness, I can also attest that it was fun. But I am not sorry to be have left. Like Detroit and Puerto Rico, and soon Illinois and New Jersey, the state is on a collision course with reality. I am not sure how much time they have left. But when it finally happens, things are going to get ugly.
“I and my family...”
“I was a news editor then at the LA Times...”
This is how a news editor writes?!?
As the article says, this is considered an “investment” bt hot how long to recoup the cost?
Certainly there can be no graft, corruption, helping out old friends, etc. in involved in $77+ billion dollars.....
In other news, there's this amazing technological achievement called “the jet airplane” - of course, it burns fuel, so that's bad.
Yep, I too have live in S. Cal ...... my first visit was Spring of ‘71 to Winter ‘71. Yep, Inglewood. I had ‘62 Impala w/a 409. I enjoyed the good life. Later on, I returned to work multiple times for SoCaL-Edison, & PG&E Through the mid and
late ‘90’s , up to my last trip in Fall of ‘15.
Cali as I knew it and watch it, spiraled down and now?
I wouldn’t bother crossing into the State.
It’s Gone. It won’t return. Forever ruined. Liberals have
destroyed California. Sad but True. Before long, Cali will be just like Detroit is now. A Ruined Hell Hole.
If the Train ever runs ? It will be the Train of Broken Dreams.
Good Bye Cali. YOU could have had it all.
Marin County is the best
My town Fairfax is like Mayberry
But way more fun
Nothing that a good DOJ audit/investigation wouldn’t solve. How much money you think was kicked back to California politicians?
No Federal dollars until and only if the there’s been an DOJ/SS investigation and audit from soup to nuts.
[I had ‘62 Impala w/a 409.]
Nice. 2-door?
Harbinger of the future America????
California did what Willie Green couldn’t do.
Sink the Bullet Train to nowhere.
A Taj Mahal white elephant monument to waste, inefficiency and gold-plated extravagance.
Talk about a boondoggle.
If they ever get it built.
$77 billion? You could rebuild CA’s freeways or upgrade its airports and still have plenty of money left over.
When you let government manage an important project it never gets done on budget and on time.
Certainly not by 2033.
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