A Paragraph to Ponder

From The Financial Page of the current issue of the New Yorker - - Big-Ticket Transit:

"Conservatives often reflexively dismiss infrastructure spending as a boondoggle, and liberals, perhaps in reaction, often reflexively defend it, no matter how wasteful.  But the pool of dollars available for something like public transit is limited.  The result of extravagant spending on subways and the like is that we end up with fewer of them than other cities.  For the price of what New York spent on Calatrava's PATH station alone, Stockholm is building nineteen kilometres of subway track and a six-kilometre commuter-rail tunnel.  Worse, cost overruns fuel public skepticism toward government, making it harder to invest the next time around.  It's good for government to do big things, great things.  But it's better if it can do them under budget."