zlacker

This is just poor governance, which is a symptom of the over-centralization of political power, not of being "too rich". The people of San Francisco and LA would never shell out that kind of money (>100K for every man, woman and child in LA and San Francisco combined) to build 500 miles of rail. Only in Sacramento and D.C. can leaders become so detached from reality that they'll mindlessly drop two Apollo Programs' worth of funding on a regional rail project.

If your mayor proposed to spending $100K per citizen on a rail project, they'd be thrown out on their ear. There would likely be no more important issue on the ballot, so you could make them pay for their awful decisions. But if your US House Rep voted for such a thing, what could you do? Become a single-issue voter on a rail project in California? You have no recourse whatsoever, because the democratic feedback mechanism simply does not work effectively on a continental scale. The people cannot guide our government's policy when the entire universe of policy decisions are boiled down to an absurdly simplistic "choice" of "red or blue?". So of course we get garbage outcomes.

There are solutions to this problem (Federalism, disunion, etc), but it'll take a lot more pain before people are willing to make the necessary changes. In the sense that people are too comfortable to contemplate systemic change, perhaps we are in fact "too rich".