Well, first, I think the burden should be on the person promoting it to prove that it is a good thing. Second, it certainly isn’t a necessity, and when we are talking about trillion plus dollar deficits, even if it is amazingly super awesome, it is something that should wait until we can afford it, no?
I apologize; I’m very used to people saying ‘cut earmarks’ as if it’s a viable or helpful suggestion.
Yes, clearly when the economy is going down the tubes, the smartest thing to do is imitate Hoover and do nearly nothing. And cite for ‘satisf[ying] every special interest to the max’? That’s an awfully audacious claim. And no, being $800 billion dollars does not necessarily mean that it’s all special interest stuff.
I think calling someone a ‘lying sack of [disgusting bodily waste]’ for making a connection between the two does a whole more to imply ‘wrong and waste’ than the original connection did.
Here, try this:
Person A: THat stimulus bill has lots of waste. A bunch of the money is probably going to be used to buy hybrid cars for the gov’t fleet. That’s just bailing out Detroit again.
Person B: Yeah, but upgrading the fleet is a good investment, saves operational money, AND spurs job growth.
Person A: That stimulus bill has lots of waste, A bunch of money is probably going to be used to build a train between LA and LV!
Person B: YOU LYING SACK OF POOP! IT DOES NOTHING OF THE SORT! YOU ARE POOP AND EVERYBODY YOU LOVE IS JUST THE SPHINCTER MUSCLE PUSHING YOU OUT WITH PROJECTILE VELOCITY!
Which project do you think Person B is just a little secretly worried about?
What a laughable bag of wind that speech was. The blatantly oxymoronic arguments “tax cuts = good (except Obama’s)” and “government = bad (except when they’re GOP)” seemed like hollow opposition just for opposition’s sake. Oh yeah, government needs to be small, until there is a flood, and then it needs to be efficiently GOP-run, but not that previous GOP-run FEMA, they were bad big government.
I don’t get it. What am I supposedly “secretly worried about” now?
Just a quick check shows me that Anaheim is some 30 miles from Union Station in LA - along the most congested highways in the country. Getting there could take more than an hour. Rail links between the two are fairly robust - but it is Anaheim. It is a suburb of LA that is politically separate - it is even in Orange County.
Now, there might be good reasons to bring the train into Anaheim - but let’s call this what it is - the Anaheim-Vegas run. Besides, the value of putting this into a stimulus, even as a project eligible to compete, seems silly to me. Infrastructure has its own economic benefits and costs - but immediate stimulus doesn’t enter into the equation, IMHO.
If you’re arguing that no money should be spent at all until the economy recovers, that no deficit spending at all should happen, that’s one thing. That’s what all the Republicans are crying now: we can’t afford it! That’s fine (although a bit hypocritical given their previous eight years of silence on the subject).
To mock a spending bill with blatant lies (“Disneyland!”) is to completely frame the debate on the wrong terms. Are you seriously supporting that?
I think that even if there are only a handful of eligible projects–a claim I’m unlikely to believe without some support–picking the most objectionable one and using that to argue against the entire bill is misleading on a number of levels. You can’t tell me that it is an honest argument against the stimulus to say that < 1% of the money might possibly go to a project that you dislike but won’t give the reasons for disliking. At the very best, that is an argument against the eligibility standards for that provision of the bill.
Missed my point completely, I’m afraid, Mr. Moto. If it’s LV to L.A. call it LV to L.A. But if it’s LV to Anaheim, DON’T calll it LV to L.A.; call it LV to Anaheim.
I wish people would be consistent about this.
As to the merits/likelihood of the proposed route, I’m still on board with the FRA’s assessment that it wouldn’t make economic sense, and thus it’s unlikely to occur, Senator Reid’s fapping notwithstanding.
ETA: p.s. AFAIAC, suburbs do not cross county lines. So anything in OC is disqualified from being a suburb of L.A. And we’re closer to Long Beach, anyway.
It’s not IN the stimulus. It’s not IN the stimulus. It’s not IN the stimulus.
What part of that is not sinking in for you?
Why isn’t it a stimulus? It creates jobs, doesn’t it?
The government paying you to dig a hole and fill it up again would stimulate the economy. In this case we’d be building something extremely valuable that would pump both California and Nevada’s economies. Why isn’t this stimulative? Specifically?
Edit: I was actually going to add the same thing DTC did above as a final point, but forgot.
Good question. Moto seems to be implying that it’s not stimulative because it isn’t shovel-ready. Yet Sinaijon appears to be implying that it is shovel-ready.
Speaking as one of the inconsistent, I’m not going to call it “Las Vegas to Disneyland” or even “Las Vegas to Anaheim” until the money is actually allocated as such and the route is being laid out. To allow the “Disneyland! OMG” lie to frame the debate is foolish and I care not to repeat the lie for the sake of consistency.
“If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a wagon,” the saying goes, but I’m not going to call her Mrs. Wagon just because “wagon” is the new Republican buzzword.
JMHO, but regional high speed rail is something long, long, long overdue in this country. “Disneyland to Las Vegas” seems like a demonization of the idea to make it sound superfluous and pork-barrelish, but I see absolutely nothing wrong with high speed rail in that region of the country.
Hell, I’d welcome that development in the Southeast. It must be HELL to drive in SoCal. In fact, I know it is.
How would they route it to Anaheim in the first place? Last time I looked, the Cajon Pass was kinda congested with rail traffic already. And there really isn’t room for a new rail bed.
Doesn’t mean the the Republicans are any less weaselly, of course.
You’re actually a suburb of Fullerton, correct? 
Are people in this thread still republicanizing that there is a high speed train from somewhere in Nevada to somewhere in the LA area? If so, then they are deliberately republicanizing because it is provable that there is no such thing. Say, do you know how to tell when a Republican is republicanizing? His lips move.
Please to explain: Los Angeles Angels of Anneheim.
Just don’t call him “Macaca”.
Well, Bobby has at least one vocal supporter!
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/02/25/rush-mentors-jindal/
(Warning: Lefty site, because if you think I’m gonna link directly to Rush Limbaugh, you’re outta yer friggin’ mind!)
The gushing admiration is mutual, it appears.