Lots Of Talk, No Action: The Current Impotency and Lack Of Leverage Of America Foreign Policy

This blog has often talked about the American political class inability to get anything accomplished relative to the major issues facing Americans today. These major issues include the failed war on drugs, failing public schools, the lack of a national energy policy, a non-existent immigration plan and strategy, and the failure to solve the problem of escalating health care costs in this country.

However, this inability apparently is not restricted to the domestic side of political class responsibilities. If you look at our country's foreign policy recently you see very few successes (recent trade agreement with South Korea) and a whole lot of failures:

- There was a recent conference in Geneva that involved Iran and the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, and Germany [Associated Press - December 7, 2010]. The conference was supposed to find a way to allow Iran to develop a peaceful nuclear energy program while preventing them from developing nuclear weapons. The talks ended with a promise of all countries to get together again in 2011. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley went so far to say that: "We are encouraged that there will be a follow-on meeting [in 2011].

Sound familiar? It seems this dance has been going on for a long time, with Iran skillfully sitting down for talks with the over eager other six nations and hinting at enough progress to not kill future talks but never agreeing to anything either. This has been going on for years, with no concessions from Iran but serving as their delaying tactic for their continued developed of a nuclear weapon capability. Lots of talk, no action.

- The never ending search for peace between the Palestinians and Israel also has recently been in the news. The United States, for years, has tried to mediate talks between the two factions, with a recent agreement stipulating that Israel would not do any more settlement construction in Jerusalem for 90 days. This agreement was necessary to prevent the Palestinians from walking out of the peace talks. The Obama administration was so desperate for the 90 day window that they agreed to get billions of dollars of weaponry to Israel and made other diplomatic commitments for their moratorium on construction, all for a mere 90 day freeze on construction.

However, shortly afterward, Israel declared that the U.S. was too consumed by the Wikileaks fiasco to talk peace (Associated press - December 7, 2010) and that the U.S. had stopped the peace talk process. The State Department denied that this was the case and the talks were still on. However, it appears that the Israelis are using the weak excuse of Wikileaks to get the military hardware and diplomatic air cover that the U.S. committed to but never wanted to continue the peace talks anyway. Thus, all of the United States' plans to keep both sides happy and talking are likely to fail. Lots of talk, no action. 

- Every time that North Korea acts up, the United States goes begging to China to please, please intervene and keep the North Koreans in check. However, China apparently has very little motivation to keep the North Koreans in check according to recent news reports and documents:

• China likes having a buffer between itself and U.S. ally South Korea. If the North government should collapse, then South Korean, and possibly U.S. troops, could be sitting on the Chinese border, something they probably do not want.
• If the North Korean government should collapse, there is a very high probability that millions of starving North Korean citizens would flee to the more prosperous China in search of food and shelter, an event that the Chinese definitely do not want to cope with.
• The North Koreans intermittently act aggressively towards Japan, a military and economic competitor of nearby China. With North Korea as a wild card, it distracts Japan in its affairs and confrontations with China.

As with the Mideast peace talks and hopes and the delaying Iranians nuclear meetings, lots of talk, no action when it comes to North Korea.

What do all of these situations have in common? Namely, the United States no longer has the leverage to make/convince others to do what it wants. Without leverage, other parties will do what the want and is best for them, not what is best for U.S. interests. Especially today, with a fragile economy, the United States has lost the leverage of economic power. China's economy has grown so much and made us so dependent on it that we can do nothing but go to the Chinese and beg for them to do something about North Korea.

The Israelis are living in a prosperous economic environment that is relatively secure. The Palestinian leaders exist and continue in power because of the hatred it sows among its citizens towards Israel. None of the parties involved, Israeli and Palestinians citizens and leaders really want peace as defined by the United States. We have no leverage to make them change their minds from the status quo but we are gullible enough to sign short term and costly agreements that the Israelis abide by or ignore at their will. Again, no leverage to make them do what we want, they have more to lose than to gain.

What leverage do we have with the Iranians? Obviously, the five or six rounds of sanctions that have been imposed on them have had insufficient leverage to make them stand down from their nuclear weapon ambitions. Plus, we are dealing with some very irrational and possibly insane rulers, both in Iran and North Korea. Without leverage to apply to their irrational interests, the United States is relegated to diplomatic beggar again and sits at these meetings with no power or leverage to enact anything effective. As a result, the Iranians play us for fools as they delay and delay as they develop and develop nuclear weaponry.

A wise old business saying goes as follows: "Never be so in love with a business deal that you cannot walk away from the negotiating table." Our political class and politicians have become so in love with these "deals," a nuclear free Iran, a well behaved North Korea, and a lasting a stable Middle East peace accord that they cannot walk away from the table. We continue to sit at the table and talk and talk because we have diplomatically, militarily, and economically no leverage to do anything else, looking diplomatically impotent in every case. Without leverage or the creativity to create leverage, you get played for a fool, which is exactly the position that our politicians have put is in today.

Which should not surprise us. The meager efforts of the political class to domestically improve life for Americans have almost always been a failure (e.g. Cash For Clunkers, TARP, etc.). And usually the root cause of these failures is that the meager and ill-thought out programs from our politicians usually have no leverage. Without leverage, plans usually fail miserably.

But that discussion is worthy of another post in the near future but before then, think about some of these recent failures and try to identify what leverage was inherent in the thought process of the programs. I will bet that you will find that there were none. As a result they failed as miserably as the foreign affairs fiascos above.




Our recent book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.


Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/

Our Political Class: Still Clueless But Still Making Predictions

I really get a kick out of our politicians when they try to make predictions of any sort. They keep trying and they keep getting them wrong but they continue to show the fortitude to go on with more fruitless predictions. Before we review the latest prediction from Harry Reid, let's quickly review the recent past history of politicians' predictions:

- In the run up to the invasion of Iraq, I vaguely remember Bush predicting that the military effort would cost less than $100 billion. I do not remember the exact number, $60 billion sounds familiar, but it was less than $100 billion. Well, many years later we know he missed that prediction by hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars in ongoing expense before you even count the long term expenses of continuing care for our wounded and the interest on the debt that was incurred to finance the invasion. In all probability, the true cost of the invasion will exceed at least a trillion dollars, conservatively at least ten times higher than the original Bush prediction.

- When the Obama administration was hyping its economic stimulus package, the threat was if the package was not passed, unemployment could get as high as 8%. In hindsight, I am sure that the Obama administration would welcome 8% since the unemployment rate zoomed right past 8% and has hovered just under 10% for a long time. Missed that prediction by just a little bit.

- I also got some laughs out of another economic stimulus prediction, one that involved changing the rules as time progressed. The original intent of the stimulus package was to create a couple of million permanent jobs. However, as the stimulus money got spent, nowhere near a couple of million permanent jobs got created. That was when the prediction was changed from jobs created to jobs create and jobs saved. When that definition did not work, the prediction was changed from jobs created and saved to include jobs touched. Somewhere along the line the criteria for a job being permanent was relaxed to any job, permanent or temporary. Even with all of these definitional changes, this prediction still has not come true, given the much higher than expected unemployment rate.

- The bank bailout prediction was also pretty funny. Think back to the end of the Bush administration and how Bush and Treasury Secretary Paulson were claiming that unless there was a massive taxpayer bailout of the U.S. banking system, the financial system of the world would crash and we would see the coming of the next Depression. Nice prediction but apparently way off base as far as being accurate. The bailout bill did get passed and signed and by November, 2009, the first "failing" banks were receiving their TARP bailout money.

However, one of the criteria for receiving the money was that severe restrictions were placed on the wage levels of bank executives. All of a sudden, many of these banks were scrambling to give back the TARP money, so much so that a mere seven months after the first TARP checks were cut, many of the banks had already returned their bailout money.

But let's reason this one out. If the banks that received the money were in such dire financial shape, how were they able to return the money so quickly? Couldn't they have muddled through these few months somehow by slashing costs, issuing more stock, selling off assets, or taken any number of actions to get them through this short period of time? Or were these banks never really in trouble in the first place and just wanted a free lunch from the taxpayers via the political class and government? We could not have been that close to a Depression if the majority of the banks returned their TARP funds so quickly, mere months, so that their executive pay levels would not suffer.

- And now to the latest grand prediction, this one from Harry Reid, majority leader in the Senate. In an Associated Press article today, Mr. Reid was extolling the Senate's passage of the bill that would extend the Bush tax cuts on January 1, 2011 as well as do a number of other things. Mr. Reid is quoted in the article as predicting that passage of the legislation would result in the creation of two million jobs.

If this was such a good idea and will actually create two million much needed jobs, why was this legislation not passed long ago? Wouldn't the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress wanted this passed before they got whooped on election night?

Also, with the exception of decreasing the Social Security tax for one year and adjusting the estate tax numbers, isn't the vast bulk of this legislation designed to keep the status quo? If the status quo so far has not generated two million incremental jobs, what makes Harry think that it will now? For a family with a breadwinner making $50,000 a year, their Social Security savings will be about $20 a week, hardly enough to create demand for 2 million new jobs.

Thus, I have no idea how Mr. Reid comes up with two million more jobs by keeping the status quo and giving American families back $20 a week. It makes you wonder how these people come up with these numbers. Just as the two million job number makes no sense, neither did the Bush Iraq number, the TARP prediction, the unemployment estimate, etc.

I have a four part question that I would love to know the answers to:

1. Do our politicians really believe the numbers they spout out? 
2. Do our politicians even understand the derivation and the logic behind the numbers they spout out?
3. Are they ever embarrassed when the reality comes nowhere close to the numbers they so confidently predicted?
4. Are they aware up front that the numbers are bogus and use them just to get their way or legislation passed? If this is the case, then we have a more serious integrity issue with our politicians then we thought we did.

The bottom line is their track record is horrendous when it comes to predicting numbers and results and we would all be better off if we ignored future predictions from the political class. It is a waste of their time and credibility and usually a waste of our tax dollars. They should follow that old saying that goes something like this: "Better to remain silent and thought ignorant than to speak up and remove all doubt." Or in our case: "Better to not give a prediction and thought clueless of the future than to speak up and remove all doubt."







Our recent book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.
Please visit the following sites for freedom:
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/

More Bad News On Obama Care - Strikes One, Two and Three

Trust me when I tell you that I do not go out looking for bad news on Obama Care, the health care reform legislation that the Democrats forced through the back door of reconciliation for passage in the spring. It is just that the bad news and pending failures of the legislation just keep on coming.

We have already covered the fact that many major corporations including AT&T, Verizon, John Deere, and Caterpillar have made very public overtures that they may drop their health care insurance plans for their employees and retirees since it is less expensive for their companies to pay a government fine for not having a health insurance plan than it would be for continuing to have employee and retiree health insurance. The Associated Press reported several months ago that the much touted ten year savings of $135 billion for the Federal government was really closer to a ten year savings of less than $25 billion since the Congressional Budget Office's estimate of $135 billion did not include all of the programs and their associated costs that went into the final legislation. The CATO Institute's detailed analysis of every component of the legislation led them to estimate that rather than reduce the Federal deficit by $135 billion it will increase it by over $2 TRILLION.

Now, consider some recent bad news:

- According to a recent article in the New York Times by Reed Abelson, as the Obama administration rolls out components of the health care reform legislation they are finding that they have to already start issuing waivers to prevent some insurance companies and employers from terminating their current health insurance plans in order to stay in conformance with the legislation. The article also points out the administration has already promised to issue more waivers going forward.

The administration has already issued 111 waivers covering about 1.2 million American workers, workers that would not have been able to continue to get health insurance from their employers, because of Obama Care guidelines, without the waivers. Apparently, those in Washington who put the law together never took the time to do some elementary homework and understand the impact it would have on these million plus American workers before the legislation is even ten months old.

- Talk about unintended consequences. Another New York Times article, on November 21, 2010, discussed how the new health care reform legislation would lead to a "merger mania" in the health care industry. This mania would occur as hospitals, medical clinics and doctor practices merge together to save costs and cash in on the incentives in the legislation. The article described the merger activity as a "growing frenzy."

As a result, many in the medical industry have hired and sent lobbyists to Washington to persuade the Obama administration to relax or dump existing laws and regulations that attempt to prevent health care monopolies. Some health care experts fear that this merger mania will reduce competition within the industry and by creating a more monopolistic environment, actually drive up costs for providing health care. It would create incentives, under Obama Care guidelines, to short change the health care given to patients in order to collect cost savings bonuses under the legislation. According to an expert on the health care industry quoted in the article, Thomas L. Greaney from St. Louis University: "The risk that dominant providers and dominant insurers may exercise their market power, individually and jointly, has never been greater." Great, a law that was intended to reduce costs will probably increase costs.

Great piece of legislating, folks. A law that was supposed to foster competition, provide health care coverage for more Americans, and reduce the nation's health care costs, is actually likely to suppress competition, throw more Americans into the pool of the uninsured, and will lead to skyrocketing health care costs. Strike one, strike two, strike three, you're out.

The only way out of this fix is to start over. The batter known as Obama Care has already struck out and we are still in the first inning of passage. The process established in the Social Issues section of "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" provides a process and approach to identify the root causes of our rising health care costs, formulate solutions that directly attack those underlying root causes, and does it all without lobbyists and politicians. Obama Care never understood or attacked the root causes, it just moved money around within the current system, loaded on way too many new rules and regulations, and stirred in some additional taxes on top of everything. As a result, we get the mega problems we are seeing already with the legislation. Throw out the existing law and bring in some new players that know how to play the game of solving a problem.

 Our recent book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.



Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/

The Latest Silliness and Insanity From Our Political Class

If you follow our political class and their inane actions and antics long enough and close enough, you are continually amazed about what they do and how much time, resources, and taxpayer money they waste without ever really accomplishing anything worthwhile. Their actions range from just outright waste to wasting time on issues and topics that have very little to do with the average American's daily life.  Consider some of the latest examples:

- Outgoing Governor Charlie Crist of Florida just got whooped in his bid to become the next U.S. Senator from Florida. This has caused him to be out of the office a lot lately while the Florida economy continued to be a basket case with high unemployment, high foreclosure rates on homes, and no immediate prospects for an economic upturn. Florida schools, while improved, are still not where they should be. Thus, now that he is back to being a full time Governor with limited time in office, one would have hoped he could have finished out his terms vigorously on some of these major issues.

No chance. According to an Associated Press article on November 17, 2010, Governor Crist has decided he wants to work on getting a state pardon for Jim Morrison of the Doors, who was convicted of exposing himself at a concert in Miami 41 years ago. Mr. Morrison died in Paris 39 years ago. According to the article the Governor will need the support of at least two Cabinet members and even then it might be a problem to pardon a dead guy from almost 40 years ago because the state has no procedures and law in place to do so. Talk about a waste of time and effort, does anyone, anywhere really think this is a pressing issue except for Mr. Crist?

- According ot a short blurb in the November 12, 2010 issue of The Week magazine, California Governor Arnold Schwarenegger has recently banned the use of state government-issued welfare debit cards at psychics, medical marijuana shops, bingo parlors, tattoo parlors, and cruise lines, all of which have shown up as locations where welfare recipients are spending the state taxpayer dollars. I think it is a great idea that the Governor is shutting down this gross misuse of taxpayer dollars but why was this behavior not forbidden from the first day the debit cards were issued? A rational human being would have initially restricted the use of the cards to food stores, medical establishments, clothes stores, etc.

- This example falls into that wonderful category of : "Why didn't they do the math upfront?" Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke spoke to Senators today to explain his plan for printing about $600 billion of U.S. money to buy back Treasury notes from the public domain in an attempt to lower interest rates, resulting in more economic growth and more employment.

He told the Senators that his plan would result in 700,000 new jobs created over the next two years. Let's do the math: the Chairman is going to flood $600 billion into the market and create 700,000 jobs which comes out to about $857,000 to create a single job. Hardly sounds like an efficient way to create jobs. Last I saw was that there were about 14 million unemployed Americans so at this rate the Chairman would have to float about $12 TRILLION to get everyone a job, which is a ridiculous idea and number.

But this type of silly thinking is not much different than the Obama administration job claims. It claimed to have created over 3 million jobs by implementing its $800 billion stimulus program. However, more simple division shows that the $800 billion total program cost resulted a per job created cost of over $250,000. Don't these people in Washington ever to the math?

- With the Federal government spending out of control and the national debt skyrocketing, one would have hoped that sanity would prevail and that the Feds would be looking for non-painful ways to cut spending. That does not appear to be the case, at least according to a Heritage Foundation report from October 4, 2010, a report that cited the New York Times as its source. According to their information, the Federal government's National Science Foundation will award $700,000 of taxpayer money to a New York theater troupe to produce and stage a show entitled "The Great Immensity" which will look into "the emotional and psychological aspects of the current environmental crisis," i.e. global warming. Number of insanity aspects to this action:

• First, the Foundation was founded in 1950 "to promote the progress of science, to advance the national health, prosperity and welfare, and to secure the national defense." Personally, I find it difficult to connect their charter to a local play about global warming. As did the New York Times which called the grant a rare gift, recognizing that the Foundation usually funds research that involves math, science and engineering, not emotional and psychological aspects of anything.
• Second, while many think global warming is a man made problem, many others do not hold that belief. The article cites experts that would dispute the notion of global warming. Would not this money have been better spent in hard science areas to actually get more proof, one way or another, on what the root cause of the problem is and what possible solutions are out there?
• Rather than fund local plays that will be seen by very few people and have an impact on even fewer, would not this money have been better spent to reduce taxes, pay down the national debt, hire a few more good teachers, treat a few more drug addict Americans? The Federal government should not be in the theater subsidy business.

- Staying in the area of global warming, consider an article on the rash of new electric car models that will be hitting markets around the world soon. In a review of these new models and their impact on the environment, an article in the October 9, 2010 issue of The Economist magazine worried that although the electric cars would reduce harmful emissions, those reductions might be offset by the additional fossil fuels that would have to be burned to create the electricity that runs the new electric cars.

Skeptics quoted in the article doubted that the electric cars would have much of an impact at all and would waste taxpayer money in the subsidies the political classes in all countries are throwing at, and possibly wasting, on electric care purchases. The article quotes Richard Pike's work as chief executive of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He estimated that replacing all of Britain's cars with subsidized electric cars, and using Great Britain's current electric generation fuel mix, would cost 150 billion British pounds and would reduce carbon emissions by only 2%. With that subsidy money, according to Mr. Pike, Britain could replace its entire power generation capacity with solar cells and cut carbon emissions by one third.

Is Mr. Pike correct in his analysis? I have no idea but given his position in the science world, would not it be a good idea to take a comprehensive look at the value of electric cars in general and the value of their subsidies? A 2% reduction in carbon emissions vs.  a 30% reduction certainly merits a little better subsidy legislating beforehand, i.e. do the math first.

- A Wall Street article by Jonah Lehrer was summarized in the November 12, issue of The Week magazine and was entitled: "Proof That Pundits Are Clueless." The main thrust of the article was that the future is impossible to predict. It cites a long term University of California study that actually monitored the predictions of pundits and experts in a variety of fields. Of the 82,000 predictions from the experts that the study documented and tracked, the accuracy rate was below 50%. In other words, a simple coin flipping decision process probably would have done a better job than what the experts predicted. The study found that the results were consistently bad across the political spectrum and the most famous experts were usually the worst predictors. Thus, given this study's results, one needs to be very skeptical when a Federal Reserve chairman tells you that his actions will create 700,000 jobs or a President tells you that unemployment will never go above 8% if his economic stimulus package is passed, or an economist tells you they know the future when very few of them, along with our politicians, never saw the coming of the "Great Recession" until it smacked them in the face.

- And finally, some very sad and serious insanity. According to an article in the Chronicle Of Higher Education that was summarized in the November 12, 2010 issue of  The Week magazine, in the United States more than 5,000 janitors and more than 8,000 waiters and waitresses have earned Ph.Ds or the equivalent before settling into their current job. In total, 17 million working Americans have received college degrees but are employed in jobs that do not require a bachelor's degree. What a waste. We have allowed the political class to steer us into an economic situation where millions of people are not using their full capabilities, capabilities that could find cures for diseases, make factories more efficient, teach our kids better, invent better products and services, etc.

Funny, sad, wasteful, ridiculous, you pick your own adjective to describe this behavior. I could quote from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" on how implementing term limits, holding Congressional committee members accountable or reducing the size of government would help eliminate some of these inane acts of our politicians. These steps would probably all help.

However, we need to do a better job as an electorate in selecting capable candidates who are smart, problem solving oriented, and courageous enough to take unpopular stands, even if it might harm their political career. We should not accept people in office that actually want a political career, we need people in office who want a leadership career.



Our recent book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.



Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/

The Fallacy and Fantasy Of The Potential For High Speed Rail Success In This Country

High speed rail service has been on mind my lately since there are two big rail projects in the news lately, one from my home state of New Jersey and one from my current state of Florida. They both came to mind when I came across a Washington Post article by Robert Samuelson, "The Myths Of High-Speed Rail Service," that was summarized in the November 12, 2010 issue of The Week magazine. Mr. Samuelson quickly reviews the Obama administration's high speed rail plans that will cost $10.5 billion for the preliminary work and eventually could cost $200 billion to build high speed train lines in 13 major U.S. corridors.

What does Mr. Samuelson think the payoff for this taxpayer investment of $200 billion? He thinks the return will be next to zero because:

• America will not be able to replicate the success of high speed rail in Europe because the bulk of America does not live close to metro centers like the populations of Europe, rendering high speed rail line virtually useless for the travel needs of most Americans.
• Also, most Americans work relatively close to their homes, making high speed rail lines a non-event for most of the 120 million Americans that commute by driving to work each day within or near their local communities.
• According to Mr. Samuelson's estimates, a national U.S. high speed rail line will serve only a very small subset of people, possibly in the tens of thousands of people. This small set of people would only include those that make occasional trips between urban centers.
• If you assume worse case and that the estimate of tens of thousands comes out to 100,000 riders, then dividing the cost of $200 billion by 100,000 riders you end up with a cost per high speed rail rider of $2,000,000 per rider, hardly an efficient use of taxpayer money.

Thus, in Mr. Samuelson's informed opinion, high speed rail service between major metro centers will be expensive, will not affect most Americans, and will not make any significant improvements in the environment since high speed rail will remove very few cars from our streets and highways.

The scary thing about the $200 billion estimate is that our political class has never put forth a transportation project estimate that was even close to the final reality. Most people know about the Big Dig  project in Boston that was supposed to cost less than $3 billion but went over the budgeted amount by many times over, was completed late, the finished product leaks water badly, and a construction flaw actually killed a driver there several years ago from falling roof panels.

More recently, the New Jersey governor shut down a planned project that would have built a much needed new rail tunnel from New Jersey into Manhattan. While everyone agrees the additional tunnel is needed, the cost of the project went from $5 billion in 2005 to a recently updated figure of $9 billion just five years later with the governor's office estimating that the real number might actually be between $11 and $14 billion. For a state that is suffering from huge revenue shortfalls, the governor probably made the right short term decision to stop the construction of the new tunnel because the state cannot afford it.
But the granddaddy of all failed transportation projects belongs to California and its attempt to build a high speed rail line along its length. According to an article by Tim Cavanaugh in Reason magazine last August, the following situations have cropped in California's High Speed Rail Authority:

• A state auditor found that the authority had paid $4 million worth of invoices that it had not receipts for.
• When the auditor checked 22 contractor invoices, she found the Authority had paid 20 of them worth $6.9 million without checking if the work on those invoices had actually been done.
• The Authority paid $46,000 for furniture for the Project Manager's office.
• The auditor concluded that the Authority had weak estimates of ridership, weak estimates of what government entities would be funding the entire project, and how the authority would manage the risks involved in a project of this complex undertaking.
• The auditor found that the regional contractor working on the simplest part of the entire plan, the Los Angeles to Anaheim leg, had completed 81% of the planned hours to work on the project but had spent 230% of the budgeted dollars.
• The state legislative analyst's office in California in early 2010 discovered that the Authority had no timeline plan for the completion of the entire project and had possibly illegally used bond funds to subsidize its operating budget.
• Mr.Cavanaugh points out that since 1996, this project has cost taxpayers more than a quarter billion dollars but not one rail of track has yet to be laid. This time frame is longer than the time it took to build the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1800s.
• The project is estimated to cost $43 billion of which only $11.25 billion has been allocated. Given the dire straits of California's finances, it is doubtful additional funding can be found under favorable terms, given the dive in the state's creditworthiness.

Enough with California, you can begin to see my doubts with the current members of our political class being able to pull off any kind of major transportation public works project efficiently and effectively. But the bad news on public transportation has recently hit closer to home here in Florida. In an October 29, 2010 article in the St. Petersburg Times by Bill Varian, he laid out a major problem that Tampa Bay area officials were having relative to their proposal to build a light rail, more commuter friendly rail system in Tampa's Hillsborough County. A rail system like this, tailored to the local needs of local residents, probably has a far better chance of success, from a financial, environmental, and usability perspective than a high speed rail line that most ordinary Americans would never use.

The problem Mr. Varian points out is that the construction cost for the proposed light rail line, which was originally estimated at $70 million per mile by the county's Metropolitan Planning organization, was reestimated recently by the Hillsborough Area Regional Transit organization to be between $85 to $120 million per mile of construction. Thus, you have two government entities giving two wildly different cost estimates of the same project. As a result of the escalating cost estimate, and possibly other factors, on election day Hillsborough County voters turned down a plan to increase the sales tax to fund the light rail project.

The second local rail project close to my home is the planned high speed rail line from Tampa to Orlando. The proposed high speed rail line would run from Tampa to a stop in Lakeland, Florida and then continue on to Disney World outside of Orlando to another stop outside of Orlando and finally finishing up at the Orlando airport. This project is part of the Obama administration's plans to build out that $200 billion network of high speed trains. This leg of the plan is considered relatively easy to build out since the land it will travel over is quite level, there are no mountains, forests, or residential communities to cut through, and most of the high speed line will run on a straight line along Interstate 4, which is the main road between Tampa and Orlando.

However, I am not a transportation expert and I foresee some serious problems with this use of taxpayer money:

• First, since the area around Tampa has very little mass transit capability, especially since the voters nixed the idea of a local light rail system, potential users of a high speed rail line will find it difficult to actually get to the rail line station without using a car.
• The current plan does not foresee the rail line ever connecting to the Tampa Airport so that anyone flying into Tampa and wanting to get to , or making the reverse trip to get to the Tampa Airport, would have to make some additional ground transportation arrangements to get from the Tampa Airport to the rail line station.
• We are frequent Disney visitors from our Tampa Bay area home in Pinellas county and on most trips to and from home to Disney, the elapsed car travel time is about an hour and forty five minutes (105 minutes). We have done it in an hour and a half or over two hours  but an hour and forty five minutes is a very consistent time. Several sources I have come across put the travel time from the Tampa high speed rail station to the Disney station at  about 82 minutes, a difference of 23 minutes from my experience driving.
• However, that is rail travel time. If I was to use the line to get to Disney, I would have to first get to the station from my home which would be about 30 minutes, wiping out the 23 minute advantage. On the other end, the estimated travel time only gets me to the Disney station, there would be additional time to get from the station to my Disney destination.
• Thus, one of the selling points for this high speed rail line, getting to Disney quickly from the Tampa Bay area, does not hold water for me as a selling point, I drive there quicker almost every time. It does not make much sense from a cost perspective either. The door to door distance, round trip, is about 180 miles. We drive over to Disney using our Honda Civic that gets about 37 miles a gallon. Thus, the cost of gas for the round trip is about  five gallons or currently less than $15 dollars. I sincerely doubt that a trip from Tampa to Disney on the high speed rail line will cost less than $15 for two adults. Thus, from a time and cost perspective, this idea makes no sense for a large number of its target market.

If you do not believe me, consider a March 22, 2010 article by Michael Cooper of the New York Times which discussed the downsides and risks of this high speed rail line leg:

• According to his estimates, the high sped rail line would trim only about 30 minutes off of the travel time along its entire length, consistent with my 23 minute time reduction over part of the line.
• In Mr. Cooper's mind, since neither Tampa or Orlando have great local public transportation, high speed rail travelers "may discover that they have taken a fast train to a slow bus." The article cites a real life example of some Tampa tourists who took a bus from Tampa to St. Petersburg to visit the Dali museum. The bus ride took two and a half hours, one way, even though the distance between their hotel to the museum was only 20 miles.
• Even a local Florida Congressman, John Mica, publicly doubted whether the allocated money for the Tampa-Orlando high speed rail line might be better spent in a higher volume traffic corridor like the Northeast. Think about that for a minute: a politician actually questioning whether money from the Federal government to his area should be sent somewhere else! Shows how bad an idea this line might actually be from a taxpayer perspective.
• State transportation officials do not know where they will get the additional funds needed to actually complete this leg of the high speed rail line network, never mind where they will find the money to extend it from Orlando to Miami.
• Since Tampa and Orlando are so close to each other, the rail line is highly unlikely to draw airline passengers since currently there are no airline connections between the two airports and an environmental impact study issued back in 2005 said the line would have little impact on auto traffic.
• America 2050, a planning group, analyzed the country's rail needs and established a prioritized list of "Where High Speed Rail Works Best." The Tampa-Orlando route did not even make their top 100 and the Miami-Orlando route came in only at 100.
• Orlando is planning a local light rail commuter system but current plans to not have the local route connecting to the high speed rail line.

Enough already. What does all of this mean?

1. Our current set of politicians do a horrible job of correctly prioritizing the country's transportation needs.
2. Our current set of politicians do a horrible job of correctly estimating the cost of transportation projects.
3. Our current set of politicians do a horrible of planning, budgeting and executing a plan that comes in on time and on budget.
4. Our current set of politicians do a horrible job of understanding the reality of the situation, putting in rail lines that cannot compete on a time schedule and cost basis or how local conditions on the ground do not make a transportation project viable.
5. Our current set of politicians do a horrible job of holding people responsible and accountable for the planning and budgets of transportation projects. As always with our politicians, everyone is in charge but no one is responsible.

As a result of this incompetence, we again end up in the situation that David Brooks of the New York Times calls "immobile government." Immobile government is what we are currently living through right now in this country: bad priorities, bad money management and no accountability in our political processes results in nothing being accomplished by our political class. As a result of this incompetence, voters no longer trust government to do anything right and end up defeating potentially worthwhile projects, like the Hillsborough Country local light rail line, because the political class has shown no ability not to waste resources on such projects.

It is a nasty place to be. That is why we need to execute a few steps from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" to break out of this immobile government mode:

• Step 34 would hold Congressional members of Senate and House of Representatives transportation committees and subcommittees accountable for the success of transportation projects, removing those members from their committee posts for failures like the Big Dig and other wasteful, failed projects.
• Step 37 would institute an annual voter satisfaction study for Congress that would directly affect Congressional raises, providing a way for voters to express their frustration with wasteful spending on failed transportation projects.
• Step 39 would install term limits on Federal government elected posts in order to ensure that long term membership in Congress does not result in long term, friendly relationships with transportation contractors, relationships that never work to the advantage of the taxpayers.
• Not explicitly listed in the book, but the political class and the government departments it oversees has to start demanding retribution from transportation contractors that fail to meet their committed time and budget commitments. It would no longer be acceptable for budgets to be busted and the disaster dumped at the feet of the American taxpayer.

Bottom line is somehow we need to inject accountability into the entire process. Until we do, public transportation projects in this country, the good, the bad and the ugly ones, will all remain a costly legacy of our immobile government.


Our recent book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.
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http://www.cato.org/
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http://realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/