High Speed Rail Doesn’t Work Over Land – How Is It Going to Work Across the Ocean

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Unleash Prosperity Hotline – Weekend Edition
Issue #800
06/23/2023, 06/24/2023, 06/25/2023
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1) High Speed Rail Doesn’t Work Over Land – How Is It Going To Work Across the Ocean
Joe Biden has earned a lot of derisive laughs for saying that the United States will build a high-speed rail train across the Pacific Ocean. That is a joke – although you can never tell these days when old Joe is just having a senior moment.

What makes this "Ninth Wonder of the World" project so delusional is that high-speed rail doesn’t work ANYWHERE in the U.S. and the grandest failure of all is the bullet train from San Francisco to Los Angeles which started receiving billions of dollars back in the Obama years. Kerry Jackson of the Pacific Research Institute provides the latest summary of one of the most expensive progressive infrastructure flops in American history:
* California’s high-speed rail, which so far is more blank than bullet, neatly fits the description – almost as if it were the primary target. It is $95 billion over budget, having been approved in 2008 at a cost of $33 billion by voters and now projected to cost $127.9 billion based on the latest estimates.
* Our CTUP transportation expert Wendell Cox warned a decade ago that ridership estimates were grossly inflated. While the California High-Speed Rail Authority assumed the train would serve 21.1 million riders a year by 2035, now it is estimated to carry 5 to 7 million, which means it will require annual operating subsidies.
* The current cost of the choo-choo is $5.15 billion PER MILE, making this the costliest rail project in world history. The costs are only escalating.

We wish to applaud Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst for sponsoring the Put the Brakes on Boondoggles Act, which would cancel transit or rail lines if “the overall cost projection to complete the project exceeds the original cost projection by at least $1 billion.”

Ernst says: “The projects are sold to the public with the promise of ‘free’ federal money, but once ground is broken, the costs magically multiply,” she said. “Going a billion dollars over budget is not a rounding error, after all, and being off by $100 billion is a train wreck.”

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2) Our “You Can’t Make This SH*% Up” Story of the Week: Biden Appoints Union Boss Randi Weingarten to School Safety Committee
Democrats appear completely unable to escape the albatross that Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teacher, is around their political neck.

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The Democrats and the White House are so politically tone-deaf and so much a fully-owned subsidiary of the teachers' unions that they will put America’s school lockdown queen on a school safety panel.

This announcement comes just two days after the National Center for Education Statistics found math and reading scores in 202 plummeted for 13-year-old students (as we reported on in yesterday’s Hotline). President Biden appointed the symbol of teacher union machine politics to a Department of Homeland Security school safety committee.

During COVID, it was Weingarten’s AFT that used the pandemic to close schools and extort government officials into surrendering to their pay and benefit demands if they were to return to the classroom. Union-dominated schools were usually the last to reopen and showed catastrophic declines in children’s academic performance, physical health, and emotional development. Despite this record, Weingarten is paid over $560,000 a year as AFT head - nine times the salary of the average teacher.

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3) Climate Change Energy Policies Hurt the Poor the Most
We are so sick of this sanctimonious label that the left is putting on their Stalinist and expensive green initiatives: “Climate Justice.” They pontificate about how the poor and minorities are the victims of a warming planet.

Actually, NO. The poor and minorities are the frontline victims of the left’s regressive climate change policies.

Our CTUP economics senior fellow Casey Mulligan has run the numbers on the Democrats' anti-fossil fuels energy policies, which, of course, dramatically raise the price of gas at the pump and energy for homes and buildings. Casey finds that a poor household pays almost 9% of its income to pay for green policies whereas the rich pay 1.5%. That is, the burden of the green agenda for the poor is triple the cost for the rich liberals who provide the most political support for these policies.

So much for fairness.

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4) San Francisco Mayor Admits the City Is a Basket Case
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We’ve said many times on these pages that San Francisco has gone from being a paragon of progressive success, to a dirty, overtaxed, crime-ridden, and the world’s largest homeless shelter hell hole in just the past decade.

We've all seen the waste and filth (literally) unchecked liberal policies have wrought on the City of San Francisco, and many people are leaving the city because of it. It's devastating to see. In a recent interview with the New York Times discussing the many issues facing San Francisco, Mayor London Breed was asked if "bloated" is the best way to describe San Francisco's bureaucracy. She replied by saying:

"It is definitely bloated. I think that’s the biggest obstacle to the challenges we experience — bureaucracy. It’s telling you five different ways why you can’t do something. Years and years of solving for issues that aren’t issues anymore."

Good for Mayor Breed. The first step to recovery is to admit you have a problem. Now, Mayor, please clean it up!

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5) New Study Warns the U.S. Is Losing Its Economic Mojo
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The Biden White House insists the U.S. is more competitive than ever, and that will only accelerate as Green New Deal subsidies start to flow.

The only problem is that the people who study competitiveness completely disagree. The International Institute for Management Development, an independent university group in Switzerland, has just issued its annual World Competitiveness Ranking for 2023.

It’s a disaster for the U.S. and shows the world’s largest economy is now mired in ninth place, having fallen to 10th place from 2020 through 2022. Before that, the U.S. had the top position for a dozen years between 1997 and 2009 and never laced out of the top three countries until 2017.

It’s pathetic and humiliating that we now rank behind Denmark and barely beat out the United Arab Emirates in terms of economic dynamism.

Those who have read Steve Moore’s book Govzilla: How the Relentless Growth of Government Is Devouring Our Economy, know that government now consumes roughly 38% of our GDP.

Step one in getting America back to number one is to cut government spending in half.

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6) Maybe the Left Was Right About Something

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