The Spending Is the Point

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, March 14, 2024

 

Shrewd outside observers of the progressive left’s most desired policy reforms can’t help but notice that their wildly inflated price tags rarely correlate with outcomes. Indeed, what the money is supposed to achieve is often given short shrift — the expenditure speaks for itself. Skeptics can be forgiven for concluding that the spending is the whole point.

 

In Joe Biden’s era, the “American Rescue Plan” with its $1.9 trillion Covid-relief, was hailed as “the biggest investment” in Democratic policy priorities since 1945 — the “largest-ever one-time federal investment” to objects of progressive desire. What it was designed to do — deliver America from the pandemic — was beside the point. Biden’s infrastructure bill, which was whittled down to about $1 trillion from the White House’s preferred $2.3 trillion ask, was hailed as “the largest American jobs investment since World War II.” The progressive wish-list items that failed in Congress are touted for their “bigness,” not in the scope of their objectives but in the sums they would appropriate. Conversely, proposed reforms that the left sees as failing to meet the measure of the moment are condemned because their price tags should be, in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s words, “way higher.”

 

By this metric, progressives should and probably do regard California’s frustrating efforts to construct a high-speed-rail network across the state as a wild success. “The project has spent $9.8 billion so far,” CNBC reported in the spring of last year. “But 15 years later, there is not a single mile of track laid, and executives involved say there isn’t enough money to finish the project.” This week, the stalled effort to develop a train that travels between Los Angeles and San Francisco at the desired pace encountered another obstacle: the coffers had once again run dry.

 

During a hearing this week before the California State Senate’s Transportation Committee on the High-Speed Rail Authority’s business plan, the project’s CEO, Brian Kelly, confessed that the program was all but broke with a meager $28 billion left in the bank. Engineering a stretch of rail line between Merced and Bakersfield was expected to cost between $32 and $35 billion, which would allow it to begin operating within the next six to nine years.

 

“Project leaders estimate it will still need an additional $100 billion to finish what voters were originally pitched in 2008,” one California-based media outlet reported. But California alone may not have to foot the entire bill. “Kelly told lawmakers he’s encouraged by an ongoing discussion with the Biden administration on establishing a railroad trust fund, and recent funds it received through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act,” that report continued. “Kelly said the project needs a strong, long-term federal partner.”

 

The total estimated cost of this project has ballooned since it was approved by lawmakers in Sacramento during the Bush administration. All told, the rail network is expected to cost a staggering $128 billion. But the project has been plagued by a version of Zeno’s paradox. The more that is appropriated for it, the more money it needs. In 2022, the California High-Speed Rail Authority revealed that the total cost of the project had jumped “nearly 22% uptick from the previous figure of $105 billion,” Construction Drive reporters observed. That’s “a far cry from the $33 billion cost voters approved in 2008.”

 

And even in the distant future, when the project is expected to be completed, it will still require vast amounts of funding to maintain operations. Its CEO is vexed by Sacramento’s failure to conceive of his rail line as a gaping maw into which taxpayer funds must be shoveled in perpetuity. “Every country around the world that has built high-speed rail has dedicated billions of dollars over several decades to see it through,” he complained. “We don’t have one penny of state support for this project identified after 2030.”

 

All this for a project that the bureaucracy Kelly heads estimates will generate an annual ridership of roughly 31.3 million riders by 2040. That’s a decline from pre-pandemic estimates — a decline that calls into question the utility of the whole enterprise. “If the high-speed rail system averaged 11.5 million people a year paying $86 for a ticket,” a SiliconValley.com analysis posited, it would take roughly 108 years for the project to even begin paying for itself. And that assumes a ridership that vastly eclipses what California’s Pacific Surfliner rail currently attracts. “It would take more than 1.25 billion people paying that $86 a ticket for the estimated $107.6 billion high-speed rail system to break even,” the analysis continued. “That is the equivalent of 32 times the population of California in 2023.”

 

We’re left to conclude that this boondoggle, which fills no discernible gap in California’s infrastructural needs and costs the equivalent of what it would take to build a new fleet of nuclear-missile submarines, is desirable only because it is desired. The left does love their trains. And that seems to be the whole value proposition here. That, and the fact that a ton of money is being spent. What more can you ask of California?