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Trump Takes Aim at a ‘Green Disaster’

By Rick Ackerman Posted on February 19, 2019, 10:19 pm EST Last Updated February 19, 2019, 10:27 pm EST

If you’re a taxpayer, you may have something to celebrate soon. On an otherwise dull news day, there was word Tuesday evening that President Trump would attempt to claw back as much as $3.4 billion in earmarks and grants for California’s high-speed rail project. The line was originally conceived as a link between San Francisco and Los Angeles, but this was never more than pipe dream — a guaranteed boondoggle that had as much chance of completion as a sky-bus shuttle to Mars.

Huge cost overruns and delays have caused California to scale back on the line so that it connects, not big cities and millions of commuters, but the sparse, Central Valley citizenries of West Podunk and Palookaville (see inset).  That sounds do-able — mere tens of billions of dollars will probably suffice — but it supposedly would be cheaper to buy a Honda Prius for each and every person who might conceivably use the rail system.

Throwing Good Money After Bad

California Gov. Gavin Newsom will undoubtedly sue to hold onto Federal dollars that have been allotted so far, and he will claim that the project, although drastically reduced, is still worth finishing. For his part, Trump tweeted on Feb. 13 “We want that money back now. Whole project is a ‘green’ disaster!” It surely is that, and even if the funds go unsurrendered, it will be entertaining and enlightening to see the project exposed for the grandiose ‘green’ scandal that it is.

  • John Jay February 20, 2019, 3:40 pm

    As with many government projects, the money will be stolen, nothing will be built:

    “The Perini-Zachary-Parsons bid was the lowest received from the five consortia participating in the bidding process, but “low” is a relative term. The firms bid $985,142,530 to build the wildly anticipated first section of high speed rail track that will tie the megopolis of Madera to the global finance center of Fresno. Do the division, and you find that the low bid came in at a mere $35 million per mile.

    And that doesn’t include the cost of rolling stock (that’s engines and cars to the normal among us). Nor does it include the cost of electrifying the route. Does it at least include the cost of land acquisition? No, it does not.”

    https://tinyurl.com/y2s9rarq

    LOL!

  • none February 20, 2019, 6:06 am

    It starts as such, with the future no longer to be a reality. Rainbows end.

    The Trump Era has begun as it will be here for decades on end, many see a Trump Era as a bright one for financial assets.

    Fewer than a dozen funds have survived since the great crash of 1929. Some are names you’d know, from big fund companies, that have grown to prominence—most notably, the top-notch $93 billion Vanguard Wellington, launched in July 1929. The $4.7 billion Pioneer fund, launched in February 1928, has a much less stellar performance history, but is ­under new management. And we can’t ignore the very first mutual fund, the solid, $6 billion MFS Massachusetts Investors Trust, founded in July 1924.

    But there are a handful of smaller, closed-end funds that have been around since the ’20s, and offer much more than just a colorful history. These active managers have toddled along, relatively unnoticed, offering solid performance, high yields, cheap valuations and strong share-buyback programs. They include Central Securities CET, -0.22% Adams Diversified Equity ADX, +0.14% General American Investors GAM, +0.74% and Tri-Continental TY, +0.65%

    Closed-end funds trade on an exchange, unlike open-end funds, and have a fixed number of shares, unlike exchange-traded funds.

    Closed-ends remain a tiny corner of the fund industry: There are just 558 today, with $261 billion in assets, compared with the $18 trillion in open-end mutual funds and ETFs.

    18 trillion Rainbows end….the public moneys.

    Gobs of breadth is a good thing….depending on where its coming from.

    The NYAD has missed ‘all the corrections in the current bull market’, including the 21.5% drop in July 2011 which was the fastest fall in prices ‘ever’ in stock market history.

    ‘Buying mania’ of the continuing biding of huge baskets of stocks masks any selling by other participants.

  • Ben February 20, 2019, 4:01 am

    I hope our President not only gets it back, but, in the process, also sets in motion a slew of lawsuits against Newsom and the state of California (which tends to happen, when boatloads of money aren’t delivered where they’ve been promised). Contractors, municipalities, Mexican mafia, MS-13, etc… Let all the dominoes fall, without mercy!


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