Californians Want Cars

California Governor Jerry Brown wants to get people out of cars.  Californians want to keep them.  Dan Walters reports:

During his first governorship 40 years ago, Brown’s Department of Transportation suddenly restricted some lanes of the heavily traveled Santa Monica Freeway to carpools. The resulting traffic jams created an intense political backlash.

Initially, Brown defended the action, saying, “Obviously, the ethic of unlimited freeways that attempt to pour cement from one end of the state to the other is over, and it takes a while for people to adjust to that.”

As the furor escalated, however, Brown ended the experiment, claiming that “Diamond Lanes” were devised by predecessor Ronald Reagan’s administration, not his.

Since then, the state’s population has climbed by two-thirds, but vehicular traffic has more than doubled to 330 billion vehicle-miles a year. With very little expansion of roadway capacity, congestion has reached epic proportions.

A recent study of traffic congestion determined that Los Angeles County has 10 of the nation’s 20 worst corridors, including a No. 1 stretch of Highway 101.

The Brown administration’s newly published California Transportation Plan 2040 indicates that one strategy for moving Californians out of their cars is to let congestion worsen.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/politics-columns-blogs/dan-walters/article68340617.html#storylink=cpy

Bad History and Political Rhetoric

At The New York Times, Adam Goodheart and Peter Manseau write that political figures often err when speaking about history.   Democrats often speak of the national unity behind public works projects such as the transcontinental railroad, but in the mid-1850s, regional deadlock over the route delayed the start of construction for years.  "Only the Civil War settled that question." The authors cite a similar example:

The story of the Hoover Dam has also been heavily tinted in rose and sepia. Asian-Americans were forbidden from working on the project, while African-Americans were limited to menial labor and accounted for less than 1 percent of the work force. In August 1931, work halted as construction bosses faced off against striking laborers, who had just seen their wages slashed even as the punishing heat of the Nevada summer killed more than a dozen men in barely a month. (Dozens more are believed to have died from other hazardous work conditions covered up by the project managers.) The heroic endeavor only got back on track after all the workers were threatened with immediate dismissal.

Republicans such as Mitt Romney make mistakes as well.

Speaking before a veterans’ group in San Diego on Memorial Day, for example, he made the seemingly uncontroversial assertion that the United States is “unique” and “exceptional in the history of the world” as the only nation that “has been willing to lay down the lives of hundreds of thousands of sons and daughters and take no land in return.” (It is a line he had used on previous occasions, attributing it to Israeli President Shimon Peres.)

No one in the crowd seemed to notice the incongruity of Mr. Romney’s making this declaration on soil that once formed part of the Republic of Mexico. San Diego fell to the United States after troops under Capt. John C. Frémont marched into the city in July 1846, hauled down the Mexican flag and imposed martial law. Over the following six months, American troops fought intermittent skirmishes against local partisans, culminating in a pitched battle in which 21 American soldiers were killed. American control of California — along with other lands making up more than half of Mexico’s prewar territory — was confirmed in 1848 when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War.

Wasteful Programs

It is not possible to balance the federal budget simply by cutting wasteful programs. But such programs do exist, as recent articles suggest.

In Time, Joe Klein writes:

We spend more than $7 billion providing Head Start to nearly 1 million children each year. And finally there is indisputable evidence about the program's effectiveness, provided by the Department of Health and Human Services: Head Start simply does not work.

According to the Head Start Impact Study, which was quite comprehensive, the positive effects of the program were minimal and vanished by the end of first grade. Head Start graduates performed about the same as students of similar income and social status who were not part of the program. These results were so shocking that the HHS team sat on them for several years, according to Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution, who said, "I guess they were trying to rerun the data to see if they could come up with anything positive. They couldn't." (See how California's budget woes will hurt the state's social services.)

Waste is not exclusively an American phenomenon, as Virginia Postrel writes at Bloomberg:

“Infrastructure” may be one of the least glamorous words in the English language, but with the right touch the concrete and steel of roads, bridges, tunnels, dams and railroads can look as alluring as a movie star. Witness the sleekly seductive illustrations produced for today’s California High-Speed Rail Authority or the midcentury pictures of effortlessly flowing superhighways, a genre that reached its apotheosis in Walt Disney’s “Magic Highway U.S.A.” in 1958.

This glamorizing extends not just to imagery but also to forecasts. Project promoters routinely overstate benefits and understate costs -- and not just a little bit.

“Cost overruns in the order of 50 percent in real terms are common for major infrastructure, and overruns above 100 percent are not uncommon,” Bent Flyvbjerg, a professor of major program management at the University of Oxford’s Said Business School, writes in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy. “Demand and benefit forecasts that are wrong by 20-70 percent compared with actual development are common.”

The American Enterprise Institute points to farm programs:

Today, farm policy consists of an array of subsidies, regulations, spending programs, and land-use restrictions that are widely blamed for the increased cost of food, environmental degradation, fiscal burdens, and the failure of global trade negotiations. These inefficient and outdated policies, subsidized by US taxpayers in the 2008 Farm Bill at a cost of $307 billion, are once again up for approval.

AEI has commissioned academics with extensive knowledge of agricultural policy from all over the country to write papers on specific aspects of the Farm Bill, including their recommendations for reform. SEE THE PAPERS HERE.