California Train to nowhere is now estimated to cost over 100 billion.

[Mike805]

Quote from Lucrum:

I thought CA already spent all their tax dollars. Don't they have a multi billion dollar budget deficit and debt?

Yeah... state taxes are f'd. We're run by morons. If you want to see corruption at the state/local level, do some research on Oakland's local government over the last decade. It is sickening.

We still pay a shitload to the feds though; I guess this train would be a "tax refund" if one could call it that with a straight face.

 

[Max E.]

Quote from 377OHMS:

The money will be handed over to the unions and they'll file for waivers from environmental regulations so they can build over protected habitats and also ignore earthquake faults.

They'll seize lots of private property from those evil 1% landowners. Nobody is actually going to ride this train so it will perpetually lose money. When we run out of funds to operate the train we'll just go back to the federal government for more federal tax dollars!

Thats what i find funny, (only because im not a resident of California.) By the time these chucklehead in the government are done spending money to build this thing, im confident it will cost at least 5 times what they originally estimated...... Then on top of that they will create a brand new useless bureaucracy to manage the train, which will inevitably end up being another huge drain on the tax payers of California, except that expense will never go away....

California has gotten to the pont where they are so far over the top, that they actually perfectly represent the ridiculous, satirical version of government that all Conservatives exaggerate about in order to portray the hopeless ineptitude of bureaucrats. At this point they are so incompetent that they are no less cartoonish than the portrayal you would expect to see on a "Saturday Night Live" Skit.

 

[Lucrum]

Quote from Mike805:

...We still pay a shitload to the feds though;

True enough of course.

I guess this train would be a "tax refund" if one could call it that with a straight face.

If CA gets a "refund" then why not the rest of us? For that matter, why would/should the feds be spending money they don't have on a "refund" of this nature? When they themselves are in even more debt than CA.

IF we/CA were flush with cash AND the project was going to be built efficiently AND managed efficiently afterwards I could see it, MAYBE.

But with our deficits and outstanding debts. I'd think repairing what we already have would make more sense all the way around.

 

[peilthetraveler]

You can't blame the "government" for this train. It was the idiot people that voted for it. I believe it was about 2 or 3 years ago that there was a vote to try and kill it saying something like we have spent 600 million already on a feasibility study and should we spend another 10 or 20 billion on it. I voted no, but obviously the idiots here thought "ooo, yes a train sounds like a fun idea...lets do it...might even create a few jobs!"


But I agree with the other guy...CA taxpayers give tons to the federal government. If we ruled ourselves, we would have 10s of billions of dollars per year as a surplus every year. Thats even with funding our own military and giving our schools all the money they need to give every teacher a $25k per year raise.

 

[377OHMS]

Quote from peilthetraveler:

You can't blame the "government" for this train. It was the idiot people that voted for it. I believe it was about 2 or 3 years ago that there was a vote to try and kill it saying something like we have spent 600 million already on a feasibility study and should we spend another 10 or 20 billion on it. I voted no, but obviously the idiots here thought "ooo, yes a train sounds like a fun idea...lets do it...might even create a few jobs!"


But I agree with the other guy...CA taxpayers give tons to the federal government. If we ruled ourselves, we would have 10s of billions of dollars per year as a surplus every year. Thats even with funding our own military and giving our schools all the money they need to give every teacher a $25k per year raise.

True, people voted for this train. Do you really want to let a state that has a 16B deficit start a 100B train project based mostly on federal dollars?

Its madness.