For almost the entire 11 years he seems to have been president,
Barack Obama has been coveting gargantuan infrastructure projects like
China's.
Obama thinks the United States should have brand-new airports like China's, even though the ones Americans already use have trouble running as it is.
Obama has also displayed rail envy. He especially loves the idea of China's high-speed rail projects, even though America has less than one-quarter China's 1.35 billion population and it's not concentrated in the large urban centers necessary to nourish such rail passenger volumes.
You may recall Obama's previously announced grandiose plans for 10 high-speed rail corridors. Like so many of his announcements and promises, it didn't quite turn out that way. Florida's Gov. Rick Scott, for one, said the only thing high-speed about what Obama envisioned for his state was the guaranteed rate of cost overruns that Florida would be stuck with. So, he declined.
We are now down to two Obama high-speed rail corridors, the obvious one in the Northeast, where donkeys can be considered high-speed transportation compared to highway traffic. And the other is in California, the nation's most populous state where people have shown no signs whatsoever of forsaking their long-term love affair with the automobile.
There are today, for instance, 22.7 million licensed drivers in California. But despite the state's outrageous annual license-plate fees, they have registered almost 32 million motor vehicles. That's about 1.4 vehicles per driver.
So, naturally Obama administration social engineers want to spend billions more dollars borrowed from guess-where to turn these auto aficionados into train trekkies. Good luck with that.
Neither Obama nor ruling state politicians have ever shown an addiction to riding mass transit themselves. But the committed Democrats think it would be a good idea for others to start doing. And building a railroad, they say, would create thousands upon thousands of new jobs. As it did in the 1860's during construction of what Obama has repeatedly called "the Intercontinental Railroad."
Read more: http://news.investors.com/politics-andrew-malcolm/092412-626754-california-high-speed-rail-project-permitting.htm?src=HPLNews
Obama thinks the United States should have brand-new airports like China's, even though the ones Americans already use have trouble running as it is.
Obama has also displayed rail envy. He especially loves the idea of China's high-speed rail projects, even though America has less than one-quarter China's 1.35 billion population and it's not concentrated in the large urban centers necessary to nourish such rail passenger volumes.
You may recall Obama's previously announced grandiose plans for 10 high-speed rail corridors. Like so many of his announcements and promises, it didn't quite turn out that way. Florida's Gov. Rick Scott, for one, said the only thing high-speed about what Obama envisioned for his state was the guaranteed rate of cost overruns that Florida would be stuck with. So, he declined.
We are now down to two Obama high-speed rail corridors, the obvious one in the Northeast, where donkeys can be considered high-speed transportation compared to highway traffic. And the other is in California, the nation's most populous state where people have shown no signs whatsoever of forsaking their long-term love affair with the automobile.
There are today, for instance, 22.7 million licensed drivers in California. But despite the state's outrageous annual license-plate fees, they have registered almost 32 million motor vehicles. That's about 1.4 vehicles per driver.
So, naturally Obama administration social engineers want to spend billions more dollars borrowed from guess-where to turn these auto aficionados into train trekkies. Good luck with that.
Neither Obama nor ruling state politicians have ever shown an addiction to riding mass transit themselves. But the committed Democrats think it would be a good idea for others to start doing. And building a railroad, they say, would create thousands upon thousands of new jobs. As it did in the 1860's during construction of what Obama has repeatedly called "the Intercontinental Railroad."
Read more: http://news.investors.com/politics-andrew-malcolm/092412-626754-california-high-speed-rail-project-permitting.htm?src=HPLNews
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