High-speed rail is a Democrat fever-dream they just can't give up on. They problem is their only answer for their fever is instead of more cowbell is more of your tax dollars.
MLive.com: High-speed rail a $100m conversation starter in early Michigan budget
The state Senate’s initial budget proposal for the Michigan Department of Transportation, which a committee on Tuesday passed to the full legislature for negotiations, includes $100 million “to encourage high-speed rail development.”
The catch, however, is that this number, which represents more than 14% of MDOT’s proposed budget increase, is “just trying to start the conversation,” says the lawmaker who took point on crafting the Senate’s transportation proposal for fiscal year 2023-24.
$100 Million to "spark a conversation" about high-speed rail, Not build it mind you, but to talk about and study it.
Given the stupidly high cost of Michigan's road repairs, that $100 million is about 100 miles of roads that could have been fixed for this money earmarked to study and "spark a conversation" about trains. Still, 100 miles of rebuilt roads is nothing to sneeze at and far more worthy than sending the money to discuss high speed rail.
Of course they want it to move leftists to places they like:
One proposal MARP has given lawmakers would expand passenger rail service into and out of Detroit, and another would create a route that goes from Ann Arbor to Traverse City and Petoskey.
Yep a subsidized a high-speed route for well-off leftists to travel between Ann Arbor and their cottages in Petoskey/Traverse City. Maybe we can name it the SWPL Rail Line - assuming it ever gets built for less than a few billion.
I'd instead propose talking to them to about the cautionary tale of California's cost overrun budget-busting experience with building or in reality not building High Speed rail . I might also explain how California has a larger population to support such a project and they can't even make it work - except for the lovely amount of graft and pay that has been making its way to Democrat constituencies in the process.
I'd even have an in depth "conversation" for a heckuva lot less than $100 Million dollars.
5 comments:
The operable statement in your post is the next to the last one.
"...except for the lovely amount of graft and pay that has been making its way to Democrat constituencies in the process."
It's silly to believe that there was ever anything else other than that in their thought processes.
juvat: Exactly, and $100 million for a "conversation" sure will grease a lot of interest group palms, get funneled into political donations, rinse and repeat.
I am past the point where things like this make me angry now. Just like hitting your thumb with a hammer. After awhile, it becomes so numb, it stops hurting, no matter how many times you continue to hit it.
I wonder if the Empress of Lansing will somehow claim that this is fixing the damn roads?
Just like water flows downhill, so too does money flow down hill, from Lansing to Detroit. You just have to reward those unions that they already rewarded once by getting rid of the right to work, here in Michigan, which will ensure that cost of any public job will go up substantially over what it had been.
Of course, I remember when John Engler was elected and screwed the working man, by making it so that the stores no longer had to mark prices on individual items so long as they had it marked on the shelves where the products were displayed. I wonder just how many stock employees were lost with that stroke of the pen? It doesn't matter who is in office, either the worker or the worker will get screwed either by lower wages or no jobs or by higher taxes and higher prices.
What a surprise coming from Governor "Fix the damn roads" Whitmer & her cromines in the legislature.
Continue to piss money away on everything but the roads.
pigpen51: Probably she will argue this takes cars off the roads by putting people on trains. Nevermind that such reduces people's options when they actually reach their destination, and that the cost of such a high speed rail fever dream would fix a helluva lot of roads and that people actually want cars to be able to go where they want to gom rather than government-mandated routes that don;t give them the flexibility they really want.
I'd have to disagree about the marking cans issue - employing someone to put a sticker on each can was pretty wasteful with the arrival of price scanners, and that person now does something far more useful than wasting time putting a sticker on a can whether in the store or elsewhere.
ccm2361: Yep, it's amazing how all those proclamations of "Fix the damn roads" has led to not much real work on roads and money being spent on SWPL options other than roads - when she had a heckuva budget surplus that could have really gone to road repair, she went out of her way to spend it elsewhere.
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