California Leading the Way
by David Atkins
Some good news for today:
cross the country, the era of ambitious public works projects seems to be over. Governments are shelving or rejecting plans for highways, railroads and big buildings under the weight of collapsing revenues and voters’ resistance.
But not California.
With a brashness and ambition that evoke a California of a generation ago, state leaders — starting with Gov. Jerry Brown — have rallied around a plan to build a 520-mile high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco, cutting the trip from a six-hour drive to a train ride of two hours and 38 minutes. And they are doing it in the face of what might seem like insurmountable political and fiscal obstacles.
The pro-train constituency has not been derailed by a state report this month that found the cost of the bullet train tripling to $98 billion for a project that would not be finished until 2033, by news that Republicans in Congress are close to eliminating federal high-speed rail financing this year, by opposition from California farmers and landowners upset about tracks tearing through their communities or by questions about how much the state or private businesses will be able to contribute.
Adam Nagourney’s article paints the whole project in a negative light, but that’s just Nagourney being the concern troll he is.
California bucked the Republican wave in 2010. It has bucked the trend of rejection of public works projects. And it’s only the ridiculous 2/3 requirement for passing tax increases that prevents California from becoming a progressive utopia in a sea of conservative economic policy.
One of the biggest reasons I’m involved in local Democratic politics is to help elect Democrats to the State Senate and Assembly, which are both held my Republicans in my neck of the woods despite being in competitive districts. Just a handful more across the state and California will have 2/3 supermajorities in both houses–enough to overcome the Republican tyranny of the minority here on budgetary issues.
Conservatives should be worried: demographically speaking, the rest of the country is going to look more and more like California over the coming years. Cultural trends begun in California tend to sweep the nation. For conservatives, that’s a very scary future.
And that’s a good thing.
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