-China built 820 miles of high speed rail in 3 years.

-The Golden Gate Bridge took 4.5 years.

-Millau viaduct in France took 3 years.

-But now we can't even build 2 miles of LAX train in the same time...

Costs and the completion time for infrastructure to be completed are horrible. You can keep defending this as totally reasonable all you want but it's exactly why our quality of life keeps going down and we keep getting outclasses by every other country.

California could be so much better if we didn't have a bunch of people like you always making excuses for everything and removing any accountability from our government. Keep electing the same people and you'll get the same results.

You're really quick to just get angry mad and throw out insults over me saying something as benign as 'wow it'd be nice if California used our tax money as effectively as the example in the article?' Just seems like a bizarre totally mundane thing to get hung up on and then have this nauseating Karen-like condescending tone 'actually... the costs are totally justified, it's fine that California spends 7-10x what every other developed country does--it just makes sense'. You reek of assigned opinion and just conformist talking points from Newsom.

I've lived in California for 40 years and every year the government becomes less effective and more tax money is embezzled and fleeced and squandered. I don't know how someone could travel to Europe or Japan and then come back to California and defend the state of our infrastructure and not be wholly embarrassed. Our schools, roads, bridges, everything that matters are decades behind (despite a sufficiently large tax base to fund those same projects).

We could be doing better, but simps like you just keep giving the one party system a free pass so there've never any accountability whatsoever. Good job, let's just keep lowering our expectations and shrugging this magnitude of incompetence off.

> I believe there's a place called "Flint Michigan" where the citizens would disagree.

How do you think Flint reinforces your argument? If anything it is evidence of exactly what I'm talking about---government bureaucrats making unaccountable decisions that then devastate and rip off the local constituents. They never fixed the Flint crisis... even Obama and Biden did nothing.

There's no reason we pay such high taxes and have so little to show for it. I get tired of the endless excuses. Every other country--even the more expensive ones like Switzerland--have more effective infrastructure projects. I honestly don't even think this is debatable. Go look at how poorly maintained practically everything in the state is--schools, roads, bridges... It doesn't make sense when we're paying such high taxes and have all the big tech companies here... I don't know why people are so comfortable with that cognitive dissonance.

To me, I can't accept it when I see other countries rapidly doing these infrastructure projects at a fraction of the cost and multiple times faster. Compare our costs to Switzerland or any other high income developed first world country--we're off the charts. It makes no sense other than lobbyists and environment lawyers and other ticky-tack bullshit that helps no one.

I also see it as a longterm competitive disadvantage and liability for the country. We can't complete big projects any more without squandering most of the tax payer money. It also lowers our quality of life when we're spending this much time in traffic and wasting our tax money for such little to show for it.