Hugo Chavez and Jerry Brown's shared delusion
The Democrats in the California Legislature, Governor Jerry Brown, and their co-enablers, the powerful labor unions, have been waterboarding the taxpayers of California with the insane notion of building a high-speed rail network in the Golden State. Never mind that the cost will eventually run a half trillion dollars in a state that currently runs a $16 billon annual deficit.
The following article was written by Francisco Toro, and published in the International Herald Tribune, part of the NY Times company. Read the entire article, the parallels to California are scarily striking.
Chavez's Great Train Robbery
ORTIZ, Venezuela - Isolated, scrubby and scorching hot, the edge of Venezuela's central plains just south of the heavily populated coastal highlands isn't exactly tourist-brochure material. A few towns and no cities are scattered throughout the area, and agriculture there has been depressed for years. Although its sparseness would seem to make this part of the plains particularly ill-suited as the location for a massive new high-speed rail project, sure enough, that's exactly what state planners are building there: a $200 million railway from Tinaco, a small town about an eight hours' drive southwest from Caracas, to Anaco, 290 miles to the east.
It's not just a train to nowhere. It's a train from nowhere to nowhere.
But never mind that. The Venezuelan government says it will begin passenger services on the line later this year, running Chinese trains that go 135 miles per hour. Who on earth do they imagine is going to ride this thing? New people, people who don't live anywhere near it yet.
The line is part of a grandiose, multidecade government plan to "rebalance" Venezuela's population away from the compact coastal strip, where more than 65 percent of Venezuela's 29 million people live.
It not difficult to see why B.H. Obama, Moonbeam Brown, and the pathetic clowns in the California Legislature are so willing to waste billions of taxpayer dollars on high-speed rail starting in the Central Valley; they already have a communist dictators' blueprint to crib from. While California's declining and docile population of taxpayers, have not, as of yet, shouldered their pitchforks and torches to burn down this frankensteinian boondoggle, the seedling of fiscal restraint has been planted and Wisconsin has shown us how such common sense ideas are nurtured and harvested.