We’re not allowed to have anything nice
by David Atkins
The L.A. Times is out with yet another hit piece against high speed rail in California.
The arguments aren’t worth pouring over: it’s another cavalcade of griping about potential cost overruns, while ignoring the vastly greatly costs to Californians in money, time and productivity needed to make an already overburdened freeway system “work” for a burgeoning population. Yes, the costs of doing something about it are great. The costs of doing nothing are greater.
But more than that, it’s stunning to see how much possibility thinking is shunned in the traditional media. The only thing the media really salivates over in terms of possibility thinking is overzealously supporting trillion-dollar military invasions, and ridiculous jaunts by Supercommittees and various anti-partisan groups to “fix our divisive politics.” But when it comes to real infrastructure projects like an Apollo Program for green energy, or major high-speed rail, or a real space program, the traditional media, yawns, tut tuts, tells us what cannot be done, and goes into paroxysms over cost outlays.
Why it’s somehow acceptable in “can-do America” for European and Asian countries to have real transportation and online infrastructure systems while America lags behind even developing countries is a question only our media overlords can answer.
Whatever the answer is, though, I’m sure more bipartisanship and another war will be able to solve the problem.
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