Jerry Brown proposes to use cap-and-trade revenues to help pay for the state’s high-speed rail boondoggle. It’s questionable whether this is legal, and even more questionable whether high-speed trains will actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions after their entire lifecycle emissions are considered.
What everyone seems to be missing, however, is that the cap-and-trade revenues won’t come close to covering the cost of a high-speed rail line. Brown proposes to dedicate $250 million of annual cap-and-trade revenues to the rail line, but even at an unrealistically low 2 percent rate of interest, that won’t even repay $6 billion worth of bonds, much less the $9 billion in bonds that voters approved in 2008 or the far greater amount it will actually take to complete the line.
The media keeps reporting the cost of the high-speed train as $68 billion, when everyone knows that’s only for a moderate-speed train. The most recent estimate of the true high-speed train envisioned by the 2008 ballot measure is $98 billion to $117 billion–and there’s no reason to think that estimate is any more realistic than the previous estimates which started at less than $10 billion.
But the drug you are referring to opt vardenafil levitra online for this medication because of its affordable prices. Generic purchase viagra from india medicines are available at an affordable rate. High blood viagra 100mg sugar makes the functioning of blood circulation slowly. There heaps of free women viagra online trial versions that you can download from the internet.
At a more realistic 3 percent interest rate, the annual payment on bonds sufficient to to cover the entire $117 billion cost will be around $6 billion a year. That’s more than a fifth of the state’s entire budget, all to subsidize a rail line that will mainly benefit high-income bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists who work in downtown San Francisco and Los Angeles.
He’s done the math and his conclusion is that the nonsense he proposes will bring him votes.
As for the financial math, he doesn’t care, math schmath, if the peasantry go hungry but Jerry Brown is a grand fromage living well, it’s all good.
What is Jerry Brown smoking?
Never mind.
He’s a nanny state ninny who thinks that marijuana should be illegal because the state and country would lose a competitive edge: “And all of a sudden, if there’s advertising and legitimacy, how many people can get stoned and still have a great state or a great nation?”
Well, how many people can get drunk and still have a “great state or nation”? About 90k deaths a year are due to excessive alcohol consumption, and the US ranks tenth in the world for per capital alcohol consumption, but our society decided, after a failed attempt to prohibit it, that the risks associated with alcohol consumption are acceptable in a free society, and the alternatives were black markets and increased violent crimes.
The article ends with Brown stating “fiscal discipline is the fundamental predicate of a free society.” Right. The “fundamental predicate” of a free society rests on the freedom of the individual to make choices, like whether or not to smoke the relatively harmless buds of a plant without a nanny state worrying about an abstract polity’s “competitive edge” or the perceived greatness of the leviathan.
More BS from Jerry Brown.
Any use of cap and trade money to reduce global warming gases should be used in the most cost effective manner. This means putting money into better insulation, energy efficient etc where the cost of reducing a tonne of CO2 is low. This is the potential problem with cap and trade. Unless the money from this taxation system is spent in the most efficient way of reducing global warming gases it is too easy to spend it on pet projects like high speed rail which are not cost effective at reducing global warming gases.
A slight correction. The proposed state budget for 2013-2014 is $155 billion http://www.ppic.org/main/publication_show.asp?i=358 (search terms “california state budget PPIC”). The reference the antiplanner uses above under the link “states entire budget” list only the past budget deficit.
Maybe he could use the tax revenue from legal marijuana to fund the train?
This proposed use of cap and trade “revenue” for a high speed train just demonstrates how they are not serious about carbon reduction. I doubt in real life the high speed train will result in any reduction in carbon use, and even if it does, it will be a trivial theoretical amount.
If you take global warming seriously and you can only garner 1% of the resources that the “scientists” say are necessary for their global socialistic plans, how can you let such funds be siphoned off for the exclusive use of the top 5%?
Sandy, while I agree with your point personally I think this says a lot more about how big of this mess the project is. They’ve cut i half what the project does and yet they can’t find anything near to what is needed to pay for this thing.
At this point I’d have to wonder if officials involved in the final plan were or still are really deluded enough to believe the Feds would be pitching in $30B or $40B to pay for this thing. After years of work, the state still has no concrete plans for even coming up with half of the price tag. Did they really think they’d get their train for rail for nearly nothing?
“Maybe he could use the tax revenue from legal marijuana to fund the train?”
Yes, and offer marijuana smoking cabins on the train. I can hear the motto now:
California: Putting the “high” in high-speed rail.
Just don’t smoke train wreck on the HSR. Total buzz kill.
Most people who propose heavy carbon taxes to reduce emissions also propose a “tax shift” whereupon some other tax is decreased to offset the carbon tax, to eliminate the specter of higher taxes in places with poor insulation (a la paul’s point).
I don’t know where the politician is getting his advice from, but I suspect he isn’t listening to his advisors and instead wants a shiny toy for a legacy.
DS
BTW, how do expect the governor to do the math in state where “students score at bottom of nation in reading, math“?
I guess having an illiterate and innumerate population helps government pass boondoggles like HSR.
Of course, if we legalize it, we’re going to have to offset all of those carbon emissions.
Except for hemp consumes 4x the CO2 as trees. And hemp can be the key to zero carbon houses. Of course hemp and marijuana are different, but certainly, marijuana can be processed for hemp purposes.
…and you can grow hemp in the San Joaquin valley at a tiny fraction of the irrigation cotton and alfalfa take, in the increasingly salinated soil.
DS
Everyone knows that cotton kills.
Good one, says the guy planning a backpacking trip…
DS
If you ran a “high” speed rail from California to Washington, you could get an initial high in CA, then munch on snack food through OR, then get “high” speed again in WA.
Look for the next made-for-TV movie where MacGyver solves the “Murder on the Dis-Oriented Express”.
With the fake carbon credits market at $.70 in the US, California’s fake cap and trade escapade brings enough pain and economic suffering by itself, let alone encouraging the completion of the super train to nowhere.
If we were to turn off the CO2 lie, just think of the money we would have available to solve real problems in this country, starting with getting our monetary inflows and outflows in order. At some point, the rent-seeking Ruling Class has got to be confronted head-on.
Just build HSR down the centre of freeways! :$