Shovel-Ready White Elephants

October 20, 2010 06:18


The white elephants are just too expensive to build, and they often seem to be aimed at disguising wealth distribution, either to favored unions or to favored donors.

Jonah Goldberg at NRO

EXCERPTS:

For instance, planning for Boston’s “Big Dig” officially began in the early 1980s with a budget of $2.6 billion, but ground wasn’t broken until 1991 and the last ramp wasn’t opened until 2006. The final estimated cost: $22 billion. According to the Boston Globe, it won’t be paid off until 2038.

And across the harbor from Ground Zero, in New Jersey, Republican governor Chris Christie has earned scorn for thinking that a proposed underwater rail tunnel between New York and New Jersey might be too pricey.

And let’s not forget Yucca Mountain in Nevada — a project under way for decades that has already cost untold billions and is being shuttered in no small part because environmentalists say that it won’t be safe enough 10,000 years from now.

Economist Paul Krugman, who subscribes to the Keynesian fantasy that spending just a bit more money than is ever fiscally or politically possible is the answer to all of our woes, is beside himself that Christie won’t pay whatever it costs to make Krugman’s commute easier.

The white elephants are just too expensive to build, and they often seem to be aimed at disguising wealth distribution, either to favored unions or to favored donors.

Taxpayers recognize this, which is why earmarks are a much bigger symbolic issue than they are an economic one.

FULL STORY



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