Building the Progressive Socialist Train from Nowhere to Nowhere

California has long wanted to build a 500-mile long high speed passenger train, a so-called bullet train, from San Francisco to Los Angeles, through the Central Valley.  California voters approved a bond ballot measure for $9.95 billion in 2008 for the project, ten years in the planning, which they were told would:

• Cost $40 billion.
• Have a ticket cost of $55 to travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
• Transport 94 million passengers a year.
• The time of travel would be 2.5 hours.
• The rail line would operate with a surplus and no subsidies would be needed.
• 450,000 sustainable jobs would be created.

The Progressive Socialist federal government of the first half of the Obama administration has approved money to assist California in this effort.  The federal and state monies presently approved will build a 65-mile long segment of the railroad for $4.15 billion.  It will go from Corcoran, CA, with a population estimated to be about 25,000, to Borden, CA.  Borden is a tiny suburb of Madera, whose population is about 57,000.  Corcoran is on the less populated side of the Central Valley with complete desolation to its south and west and the small city of Tulare, population 58,000, about 19 miles to its northeast.  Corcoran is best known for the state prison there.  It probably needs bullet train service so the prisoners released from California prisons, because California cannot afford to keep them in prison, can leave the area quickly.

With the Republicans about to take over the money appropriations control in the House of Representatives, there will be no more federal tax money going to this project for quite some time.  I think we can be sure there will be no more for at least the next 6 years, if not for the next 10 years.  The short segment of the rail to be built will not be operated until more is built.  This is likely to help guarantee that if a bullet train is ever built from San Francisco to Los Angeles, the short segment will be obsolete and the route may well be changed.  It will be better if it were never built even in part.  It will be good if it is abandoned even after this segment from nowhere to nowhere is built.  The California authority that planned this line and two years ago made the claims above before the voters approved the bond measure, now says in the best bait and switch fashion:

•  The cost will be $42.6 billion.
•  The one-way ticket cost has increased to $105.

More realistic estimates are:

• The construction cost will be somewhere between $62 billion and $213 billion.
• The one-way ticket cost will be about $190.
• At least $19 billion of federal money will have to be provided if there is to be any hope that the train will not have to be subsidized by California taxpayers, even though the authorizing legislation forbids that.
• The 450,000 sustainable job workers are twice as many as the California government's active work force.  How realistic is it that so many jobs might be created by this rail line? 

The only bullet train railroads in the world having substantial segments of their systems able to operate without subsidies are in Japan and France.  Both are in much more densely populated areas than the comparatively low density Central Valley of California with its farming industry.  As we can see, California's Progressive Socialist central planning bureaucrats are about as competent as central planners always are.  They have done an excellent job of setting California's taxpayers up for a huge fall.

Meanwhile, the Central Valley of California has suffered from severe water shortages for the last several years.  Central planners have a lot to do with this problem also.  California has two major water projects controlled by central planners.  The Central Valley Project of 1933 is a creature of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.  The State Water Project of 1960 began under Democrat Gov. Pat Brown.  These two programs caused agricultural land use to increase from 4.9 to 8.6 million acres.  This huge increase in agricultural water use was based on water subsidies, water user fees rather than prices that fluctuate with supply and demand, water monopolies by the government, and a lack of water property rights.  All of these factors cause the uneconomical use of water.  This generally means that water will of course be used carelessly and wasted.  The effect is not unlike the use of the hard-earned money of California and American taxpayers to pay for a short bullet train track segment from Nowhere to Nowhere which will never be used.

Meanwhile, it is worth our noting that the newly elected Republican governors of Ohio and Wisconsin, have announced that they were returning the high speed train grants given to their states by the Progressive Socialists.  The returned Wisconsin money was for a train route from Milwaukee to Madison and the Ohio line was to go from Cleveland to Columbus to Cincinnati.  Secretary of Transportation LaHood has given the returned $1.2 billion to 13 states that want to build these taxpayer blood-sucking high speed trains.  John Kasich and Scott Walker have no doubt saved the states of Ohio and Wisconsin a fortune in wasted capital expense and subsequent train subsidies.

The returned money is going to the Democrat states of California, Illinois, New York, Washington, Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon, North Carolina, and Iowa.  The toss-up states of Florida, Missouri, and Indiana are also getting money.  It is really hard to imagine how Maine, Oregon, North Carolina, Iowa, Missouri, and Indiana will find areas with dense enough populations to make their high speed trains pay.  The otherworldly winner of this nonsense has to be Vermont.  Its high speed train will go from St. Albans in the northwest corner of the state to Vernon in the southeast corner of the state.  St. Albans has a population of 7200 and Vernon's population is 2,000.  The biggest city in Vermont is Burlington, with a population of about 39,000.  Yes, this is the state that gave us Howard Dean and Bernie Sanders.  What can you expect.  The 13 states taking the high speed train money will rue the day they did.  No, not the damn politicians, it is the weary and overloaded taxpayer mules who will do the ruing.  At least most of these non-ruminating mules are Democrat asses.

Obama's Plan to Increase Exports

Today's Washington Post had a front page article on Obama's plan to double American exports in the next 5 years as a way to increase the number of American jobs.  This central planning scheme consists of two efforts:

• Try to restart some free trade agreements stalled by the Democrat Congress by their insistence that other countries maintain policies favorable to labor unions and the environment.
• Provide $2 billion of government funds to provide financing of the sales of American goods abroad.

Now, free trade is a great idea.  Basically, two parties will make a trade on a basis which is viewed as favorable to each party.  Everyone, both the American and the Indian, Chinese, Brazilian, Chilean, Canadian, Pole, Norwegian, or Italian with whom he is trading benefits.  This simple reality is much too often lost in schemes to protect jobs in non-competitive companies and industries.  Of course, sometimes the non-competitive company or industry is made non-competitive by government policies.  Such policies in the U.S. include:

• Sharing the dishonors for the highest corporate taxes in the world with Japan, while such taxes in many, many other countries are less than half what they are in the U.S.
• Policies which provide many means for labor unions to intimidate employees into selecting them as their labor negotiators and promoting labor union leaders into effective company managers.  Particularly strong and disturbing cases of these policies are the current situations at GM and Chrysler.
• Energy policies which drive up the cost of energy, such as mandates to use more expensive alternative fuels and restrictions on exploration and drilling in government-owned land and offshore.  Taxes on energy use are another foolishly expensive policy.
• Causing delays and added expense in the construction of new energy plants and refineries with ridiculous environmental regulatory and litigation delays.
• Raising questions about the cost of future CO2 emissions penalties, making it impossible for many companies to expand or modernize present facilities in the U.S.
• Attempts to continue pursuing a health care insurance plan which will raise the cost of health care insurance premiums, which is a significant business expense.
• The U.S. Postal Service monopoly increases mailing costs.
• Excessive safety regulation and expenses tied to those regulations.
• Excessive accounting regulations and tax record keeping obligations.
• Regulations requiring companies to hire women and certain favored minority groups.
• Foolish antitrust policies and the equivalent of class-warfare they cause between American companies.
• Subsidies or special interest tax considerations which favor some companies and industries over others without allowing the free market to decide which are the stronger companies and industries.

This list could go on and on.  But, the point here is that instead of trying to persuade other countries to shoot themselves in the foot as we have done in our free trade agreement negotiations, we should allow American companies to become more productive.  This is what you do when you want to promote American jobs effectively, not just create a photo opportunity in which you pretend you give a damn about American jobs, while doing nothing substantive.

The second Obama effort to provide government funds to finance company exports, is clearly symptomatic of the perverse Washington central planning disease in which it is imagined a few elite central planners can pick the winners better than the free marketplace can.  This pretense of knowledge, as Friedrich Hayek put it, has always soon been revealed in market chaos and distortions which the free market would not long allow.  Such programs as this government financing money through the Export-Import Bank just favor certain large companies with a great deal of influence in Washington.  They are a redistribution of income from individuals, small businesses, and companies who concentrate on providing a great product or services while trying to ignore Washington as much as possible to the Washington-savvy influence-peddling companies.  They are a bad idea, but they are loved by those who lust for power.  The companies that want this money know that their PACs must provide certain key politicians with money for their re-election campaigns.

Obama has no clue on how to create jobs and it would appear he has no interest in learning what he might actually do as President not to create jobs, but to allow companies and the private sector to create jobs.  The private sector is very good at creating jobs without government central planning interference.  Your job Obama is simply to get the hell out of the way!

Central Park Temperature Record Shenanigans

When a scientific fraud unravels, it can do so with remarkable rapidity.  This is especially true when the fraud was massive and aimed at a huge power grab over the lives of others.

A comparison of raw temperature data of the NOAA National Climate Data Center (NCDC) with its adjusted data for Central Park in New York City has now been performed for the two extreme months of July and January.  The NCDC keeps two major adjusted compilations of station by station temperature data.  One is the HCSN Version 1 set and the other is the other is the GHCN Version 2 data set.  The latter is used in the UN IPCC reports.

Let's first compare the raw temperature measurements for July with the HCSN Version 1 set. The data is shown below:

Note that the adjusted data has had its temperatures dropped everywhere, but in very different amounts over time.  The upper raw temperature data curve has a polynomial fit with a maximum temperature in about 1971 or 1972, with a very small decline after that time.  The adjusted temperature history of the HCN data set has a decided rise after about 1980.  Let's look at the adjustment made here more carefully.  The HCSN adjustment is plotted below:

For some reason an increasing temperature was subtracted from the raw temperature data beginning after 1939 and this increased until it was a bit more than 6.5 F.  Then in 2000, the temperature subtracted was decreased rapidly through 2007.  The strange thing is that rapid changes in the urban heat island effect occur as a city expands and envelops rural areas.  But Central Park has been surrounded by a very high population density throughout the period from 1939 to the present, so the heat island effect should not be changing so much.  Furthermore, the rapid decrease in the temperature subtracted since the year 2000 should be due to a rapid depopulation of the city.  In fact, NYC has been growing in population since 1990, so if anything, the temperature subtracted should have been slightly more, not much less!  This is Voodoo Science!

As mentioned, there is also a temperature record (GHCN) provided to the UN IPCC and generally kept for world-wide temperature change comparisons.  Remember, in such comparisons, we are interested in tracking very small changes of a few tenths of a degree, yet we have seen already that adjustments of more than 6 F are being applied to the raw data.  This is always dicey science when small changes are to be detected on data being adjusted with large comparative adjustments.  The raw data, the HCN adjusted data, and the GHCN adjusted data are all compared in the plot below.

Now note that the raw data is the middle plot in blue.  The two NOAA NCDC adjusted July average temperature data sets are the most different.  The hottest of the three sets of data is the global comparison data which went into the UN IPCC assessment data.  For reasons unfathomable to rational man, the net effect of having a weather station in the middle of NYC, one of the world's larger cities, is an artificial cooling effect and it has to be adjusted with a general increase to the raw temperature data.  Yes, the well-know urban heat island effect, is sometimes an urban cooling effect and sometimes and urban heating effect, by implication given the adjustments provided by our NOAA NCDC!  The temperature difference between the two NOAA NCDC temperature data sets is as large as 11 F.

Basically, it looks as though the UN IPCC wanted data indicating high and rising temperatures.  The upper green trace gave them high temperatures and the data mostly parallels the raw data, so essentially no urban heat island differential adjustment seems to have been made over time compared to the raw data.  Of course, the raw data of 2007 surely already has a rise in it due to the increased population and bigger buildings in NYC since 1909, so leaving that effect in gave the global warming alarmists the temperature increase they needed, although little of the increase occurred in the late 20th Century in the Central Park data.  Such increases could readily be found in the data from many other U.S. weather stations, however.  What was important here was maintaining the fiction that the urban heat island effect is unimportant and no adjustment for it is needed over time.  That way, all the rural stations which have become suburban stations need not be adjusted downward for the urban heat island effect.

This is the hand made visible of massive fraud, once again.