Matt Yglesias continues his excellent posting on the way that the GOP leadership is baldly lying about the stimulus bill- claiming that there is an $8 billion provision for an LA to Las Vegas high-speed rail when the bill in fact contains no such provision- just a general $8 b for high speed rail to be allocated by the transportation department, and probably a lot of it would go to John Boehner's home state of Ohio:
In a last-minute change, the total quantity of funds available was increased. But there’s no special plan for Las Vegas. The money will be spread all across the country. As it happens, I think an LA-Vegas HSR line is a perfectly reasonable project. But in practice the areas that will get a leg up should be the Federal Railroad Administration’s officially designated high-speed rail corridors. As it happens, LA-Vegas doesn’t make the cut. But guess who does have such a corridor? Ohio!
Indeed, the existing plan is a bit freakishly Ohio-centric, offering both a Cleveland-Toledo-Chicago line and a Cleveland-Columbus-Cincinnati-Indianapolis corridor while leaving things like Houston-Dallas and Orlando-Jacksonville (and, indeed, LA-Vegas) off the list. Long story short, John Boehner doesn’t know what he’s talking about and his position on this issue would imperil both short term jobs for Ohioans and an opportunity to substantially improve Ohio’s long-run capacity for economic growth.
I'll also note that, having driven to Vegas from LA on a couple of occasions, the 278 miles takes an absurdly long time, sometimes as much as 7 or 8 hours, because I-15 is the only way to get there. Given the amount of traffic plying that route on a regular basis, I could imagine this being a pretty effective project (if it was real).
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