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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Can democrats answer this question?

Why Can’t California Do Anything?

[b]California can’t build housing or railroads on time or on budget—and thanks to a bloated, value-driven bureaucracy, neither can the rest of America.[/b]

By Stephen Soukup
June 21, 2025

Just over two months ago, the Rand Corporation released a study on the cost of producing multi-family housing in three states: California, Colorado, and Texas. The results were paradoxically shocking, yet utterly predictable. California, it turns out, is a ridiculous place, run by ridiculous people, with ridiculous regulations. Or, as the folks at Rand put it, “The average market-rate apartment in California is roughly two and a half times the cost of a similar apartment constructed in Texas on a square-foot basis—and regional differences within California, where costs in the San Francisco Bay Area are roughly 50 percent higher than costs in San Diego.” Additionally, “[t]he time to bring a project to completion in California is more than 22 months longer than the average time required in Texas.” According to Rand, the culprit for these grotesque disparities is, to no one’s surprise, the differences in regulatory burdens between Texas and California and between various jurisdictions within the (allegedly) Golden State.

Earlier this month, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy was forced to issue a threat to the government of California, warning the state that the federal government was considering rescinding future funding for its high-speed rail boondoggle. According to a department report, the federal government had released more than $7 billion to California for the project over the last several years, and it had, unsurprisingly, spent all of the money, yet somehow managed not to lay even a single foot of track. As The New York Post noted at the time, “the 800-mile rail line was supposed to be completed in two phases on a $33 billion budget by 2020.” Nevertheless, the proposed line has now been abbreviated to a mere 119 miles. Its budget has ballooned to nearly $130 billion, and it appears highly unlikely that it will be completed by its new 2033 deadline.

More: https://amgreatness.com/2025/06/21/why-cant-california-do-anything/[/quote]

So true... (from the article)

"By the late 1960s, it had become accepted practice, but only in the United States, for public administrators to see themselves as value advocates and social justice warriors. And within a decade or so, that attitude had become profoundly ingrained among bureaucracies at all levels of government, throughout the country. Unsurprisingly, not long thereafter, American governments became incapable of doing much of anything."

"The Waldo-revolution turned what should have been executive-dependent, value-neutral, efficient bureaucracies into left-wing social justice machines. Not only does that explain the American bureaucracy’s overall dysfunction, but it also explains why politically left-leaning jurisdictions like California are even worse off than most places. Just as with their politicians, their bureaucrats adhere to different values—or cling to the same values more firmly and unrelentingly—making everything dysfunctional to the point of collapse."[/quote]

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