ObamaRail

Obama is doing for high speed rail what he's done for nationalized health care:

“ObamaRail” is fast becoming the new “ObamaCare” for many Republicans.

Conservative activists are deriding the high-speed rail proposals set out by President Obama in his State of the Union address and 2012 budget as wasteful spending that imposes new mandates on cash-strapped state governments.

“Look, you look at the studies of these things, when they get built, [they] cost way more than they think,” Florida Gov. Rick Scott said in a Fox News interview shortly after he rejected $2.4 billion for a railway connecting Tampa and Orlando.

The Republican governor also said states get stuck with the costs of operating the new railways once they are built. “Who is going to take responsibility for that,” he asks.
The fight over high-speed rail loudly echoes the battle over healthcare, with Republican governors in Wisconsin and Ohio also making big shows of rejecting federal money.

Way too many of these federal grants for special projects come with a rude wake-up call for the states when the money stops but the projects continue on. Remember Bill Clinton's "100,000 cops" program from the 90's? Money was provided agencies around the country to hire 100,000 cops, but when the money ran out many of those cops had to be laid off because the cities couldn't afford to keep them on the payroll. The president gets to make a flashy announcement that makes him look like a hero, but he's nowhere to be found when the programs run out of funding.

High speed rail is another of those pipe dreams of the left (and some on the right) who think if they build it people will come. But they won't come unless the rail goes where and when they need to go, and they rarely do. Unless a area can afford to build and maintain an extensive system such as the New York City subways, the ridership will always be limited and the systems hugely expensive and unable to support themselves.