Overcoming the National Construction Crisis Will Be Critical to Making America’s Infrastructure Great Again

by Newt Gingrich

America is in the middle of an enormous crisis of construction failure. The collapse of California’s proposed high-speed railroad line between San Francisco and Los Angeles is a dramatic warning that something is profoundly wrong with the American infrastructure system.

The California high-speed rail project is a tragic joke that will never be completed, as I explained last week. When proposed in 2008, it was going to cost $33 billion and be finished by 2020. Costs have skyrocketed while construction has collapsed. Now this boondoggle is projected to cost $128 billion and rising. At the current rate it will not be completed in this century. 

What makes the California collapse so painful is the reality that other countries have successfully built and operated high-speed rail systems. One survey found the 10 fastest high-speed rail systems were in Communist China, Germany, France, Japan, Morocco, Spain, Korea, and Italy. America could not even match Morocco.

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