Since Kevin Drum’s decided to become a California High-Speed Rail opponent, perhaps I should say more on this. Or, at a minimum, offer some links since Kevin’s post sort of makes it out that this is just some nutty idea being pushed by blogger train enthusiasts:

1. Here’s an endorsement from the LA Times.
2. Here’s one from the San Francisco Chronicle.
3. Here’s one from the San Jose Mercury News.
4. Other endorsements from smaller papers can be found here.
5. The Sierra Club is for it too.

On the idea that ridership estimates are unrealistically optimistic, it seems to me that the sad reality of politics is that it would be irresponsible for advocates of any large-scale infrastructure project to do anything other than present unrealistically optimistic measures. For better or for worse, that’s politics. Similarly, I never really understand the sentiment that Large Infrastructure Project A shouldn’t be done because Large Infrastructure Project B might be better. Sometimes you really do get asked “should we do A or should we do B” in which case, of course, if B is better than A you ought to answer “B.” Similarly, sometimes doing A really does prevent you from doing B — like if A and B would both require the same right of way. But that’s not generally the case, and it’s certainly not the case when you compare a statewide HSR system to a series of different local transit projects. In general, large infrastructure projects should be evaluated on their own merits. If California HSR is worth doing, then it really doesn’t matter if there may be other transit projects that are also worth doing. You do the HSR, and then you start organizing for the other projects. Doing worthwhile infrastructure projects ultimately grows your capacity to do future infrastructure projects.

For example, it seems that when we started building the Interstate Highway System the first projects funded were a stretch of I-70 in Kansas and a stretch of I-44 in Missouri. I seriously doubt that those two were the highest-value projects conceivable or, indeed, anywhere close to being the highest-value projects conceivable. But the goal of the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956 was, rightly, not to impose some kind of incredibly strict scrutiny to different projects. Rather, the goal was to make money available for a wide variety of worthwhile projects rather than spending decades tied up in arguments about exactly which highway would be the best one.

One of the few policy successes of the Bush administration has been Phillip Mangano’s “Housing First” initiative which has slightly increased costs of federal homelessness policy and dramatically increased the success of said policies. McClatchy had a good story on this topic over the weekend, which prompted Ed Morrissey to whine that there hasn’t been enough coverage of Bush’s successes in this regard. Maybe yes, maybe no. But if you want to learn more about Mangano and Housing First, check out Douglas McGray’s 2004 Atlantic article. There was also a good Boston Globe piece last year and a New York Times article over the summer.

The further good news is that the initiative doesn’t actually appear to be especially controversial, so the prospects for continuing to build on the past several years worth of success are good. The bad news is that one of the major candidates is promises to cut domestic discretionary spending indiscriminately which really would threaten a lot of the success that Mangano’s been able to achieve with what’s still, at the end of the day, a pretty small amount of money.

I’d say his re-election prospects are looking dimmer, though I believe a conviction didn’t stop Jim Traficant.

The current global financial crisis involves a lot of complicated technical matters that I’m not very familiar with. Thank God someone had the brilliant idea to bring Bernard Henri Levi’s considerable expertise to bear on the matter. That’s editorial judgment I can believe in!

I’d been wondering for a while what the deal was with the famous grizzly bear DNA study that John McCain thinks is so obviously illegitimate. Christopher Hitchens explains:

John McCain has made repeated use of an anti-waste and anti-pork ad (several times repeated and elaborated in his increasingly witless speeches) in which the expenditure of $3 million to study the DNA of grizzly bears in Montana was derided as “unbelievable.” As an excellent article in the Feb. 8, 2008, Scientific American pointed out, there is no way to enforce the Endangered Species Act without getting some sort of estimate of numbers, and the best way of tracking and tracing the elusive grizzly is by setting up barbed-wire hair-snagging stations that painlessly take samples from the bears as they lumber by and then running the DNA samples through a laboratory. The cost is almost trivial compared with the importance of understanding this species, and I dare say the project will yield results in the measurement of other animal populations as well, but all McCain could do was be flippant and say that he wondered whether it was a “paternity” or “criminal” issue that the Fish and Wildlife Service was investigating. (Perhaps those really are the only things that he associates in his mind with DNA.)

The difficulty the McCain campaign has in coming up with examples of pork-barrel spending that don’t turn out to have some justification is indicative of the overall wrongheaded way the current fad for “porkbusting” is thinking about this issue. The general idea with earmarks is that you want to enhance your popularity with your earmarks. With rare exceptions (like the Bridge to Nowhere that Sarah Palin likes to pretend to have said “thanks but no thanks” to), you don’t actually do that by requesting money for totally pointless wastes of money.

The issue with earmarking isn’t that the money generally goes to total waste. The problem is that allocating funds for basic infrastructure or scientific research according to the relative clout of different politicians is inefficient. West Virginia and Alaska wind up with a disproportionately large amount of pork, while New York, which has a low number of Senators per capita both of whom are relatively junior, winds up with disproportionately little. It really would be better if you could take all the money spent on earmarked transportation projects and instead spend that money according to some kind of neutral formula. Similarly with scientific research projects. Reforming the process would, in this sense, be a good idea. But you shouldn’t assume that the projects funded by earmarks are per se wasteful and you certainly shouldn’t assume that procedural reform would or should naturally lead to a reduction in overall spending. In general, we spend too little on basic infrastructure and research and the case for spending more would only be made more compelling by the development of a better process for allocating resources. The National Institutes of Health, for example, is generally regarded as a well-functioning organization. But that’s not a reason to slash the NIH budget, it’s the reason NIH spending is relatively easy to gain support for.