"Sally Pipes, president of free-market think tank Pacific Research Institute, said she wasn’t surprised that Assembly Bill 1400 stalled. She called it a repeat of Senate Bill 562, the 2017 single payer legislation that Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon shelved because it was “woefully incomplete”."

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"Instead of making sound financial decisions, public banks can become a slush fund to divert taxpayer dollars to whatever causes politicians prefer. Not surprisingly, the Pacific Research Institute’s Kerry Jackson explained recently on these pages that public-banking systems have been plagued by financial failure and mismanagement."

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California is of course the ugly example of the outsized expense of building a bullet train. Track over flat land is costing more than $100 million a mile while rail built in hilly terrain will cost $200 million a mile, according to O’Toole. There’s reason to doubt – and reason to hope – a bullet train is never built in California. But if it is, be prepared for even higher costs. Once completed, bullet train systems are expensive to maintain.

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A 2015 Brookings Institute piece on the government and IT calculated that 70 percent of Congress’ $75.6 billion IT budget was spent on maintaining current systems. The Standish Group, a European advisory research IT firm, found that large government projects costing over $6 million dollars had a 13 percent success rate in a 2015 study. So, California’s MyTurn user rate, 27 percent, at $50 million is a steal.

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