Tuesday, June 04, 2013

Let's Take Nice Things When They're Offered

On the twitterz earlier Josh Barro wrote:

Liberals love the ARC tunnel that Chris Christie killed bc they love anything with rails, but it was a dumb, overly expensive project.

And, yes, for whatever reasons, infrastructure projects, especially anything involving a tunnel or a bridge, are absurdly expensive compared to most countries. Other people can figure out just why that is and try to do something about it. But the choice is between increasing rail capacity into New York with an imperfect too expensive plan, or doing nothing at all anytime soon. We spend all kinds of money to do stupid destructive things that at best do nothing useful for us, so we should be willing to support spending all kinds of money on nice things when the opportunities present themselves.

I'd rather have a $10 billion pair of tunnels than spend $10 billion on equipment the military doesn't even want. That probably isn't a choice, either, but we do the latter all of the time. We shouldn't get "sensible" when the former is an option.