Don't despair for fallen train project

Comments from local leaders about proposed high-speed train projects that would pass through Barstow to bring tourists to Las Vegas and back are very instructive about where pork spending comes from and why it’s as much a conservative problem as a liberal one.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, has withdrawn his support of an extremely expensive MagLev (magnetic levitation) train from Anaheim to Las Vegas that would be mostly government funded in favor of a more modest privately backed train starting from Victorville.

This decision prompted a disappointed response from former Barstow mayor and Republican Lawrence Dale, who was a big proponent of the MagLev project and helped arrange a deal where they would build a facility in Barstow that would result in some new local jobs.

So if we understand this correctly, a local conservative leader opposes a privately funded, business-oriented train project in favor of a much larger project that would require billions in federal dollars because it would produce a few jobs in town.

And this was the guy who helped organize the local tea party to declare opposition to President Barack Obama’s extremely wasteful stimulus program. For us, it’s more evidence that Republicans are only interested in smaller government when they’re not in power.

Professor Wendell Cox recently wrote a column (you can read at freedompolitics.com) about the troubles of high speed rail programs elsewhere in the world as a warning about their problems.

“Rail promoters have never produced financial statements prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting standards to show that any high speed rail systems are profitable,” he writes. Many of them, just like our passenger rail system, require government subsidies in some fashion to stay afloat. Taiwan Today reported that their nation’s high speed rail system was failing because their daily ridership was around a third what they projected. Now try to imagine train ridership in California’s car-based culture. How much faith do you have in their ridership projections?

We should be celebrating the likely death of the MagLev project, not mourning it. It would have been billions of dollars of wasteful spending that may have enriched a few, but would have cost the rest of us plenty.