Desperate Rail Gambit
20th March 2016
San Francisco’s colorful former mayor Willie Brown caused a stir three years ago by writing some disturbing truths about major government infrastructure projects. The city’s Transbay Terminal project—billed as a future “Grand Central Station of the West”—was running $300 million over budget. Brown argued that no one should be shocked by such overruns, and that “we always knew” the estimate was artificially low. “In the world of civic projects, the first budget is really just a down payment,” he wrote. “If people knew the real cost from the start, nothing would ever be approved. The idea is to get going. Start digging a hole and make it so big, there’s no alternative to coming up with the money to fill it in.”
And this is the Democrat approach to governance generally: We will come up with a bright idea, since we are so much smarter than you, and it’s your job to cough up the money, even if it turns out that it was a stupid bright ides. California is natural home of this sort of thinking.