After a five week hiatus in High Cost Rail postings, I have finally found something worthwhile to post after 82 prior posts about this rolling disaster. Here is US Rep. Jeff Denham from California getting the better of US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood who seems to have lost what little sense he had a couple years ago about our train to nowhere. It is a YouTube video here that lasts 4:46 and gets most interesting around the 3:30 mark.
Just so you don't have to scramble to remember all of the percentages that Denham quotes, he uses the revised, re-revised, re-re-revised and basically low-ball estimate of $68 billion for the project. The "funding" is
Prop 1A 12%
Federal money committed 4.8%
Federal money unfunded 56.4%
This leaves 26.8 percent, by my calculation, for the non-existent private investment...about $18 billion. If only LaHood's comment about this dog "going nowhere" was true.
Here's Dan Walters of the SacBee highlighting the same thing as the video:
California's highly controversial bullet train project is headed for some kind of political collision.
While the California High-Speed Rail Authority is trying to quickly spend billions of state and federal dollars on a starter line in the San Joaquin Valley, the tens of billions in federal funds needed to expand the project appear to be entangled in frantic federal budget negotiations.
Republicans retained control of the House in last month's elections, and the No. 3 figure in the GOP hierarchy – Bakersfield Rep. Kevin McCarthy – last week reiterated a House resolution declaring that no more federal money be allocated for the bullet train.
"The current plan to be finished – at the smallest level – asks for another $38 billion from the federal government," McCarthy told a hearing. "Please put that in perspective. The debate we're wrestling over for the rest of the month, on our fiscal cliff, if you raised all the dollars and raised all the taxes that is proposed, you only get $31 billion in a year. And they're requesting more than what we would even get from that."
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/12/11/5045315/dan-walters-california-bullet.html#storylink=cpy
Posted by: Joe | December 11, 2012 at 08:32 AM