Buttigieg Says Higher Taxes Would Help America Build High-Speed Rail. Here's Why That's So Ironic.

Pete Buttigieg wants to talk about high-speed rail again, and once again the answer to why we don't have it is "not enough taxes." Never mind that his own department spent four years and tens of billions of dollars on infrastructure priorities while the actual rail projects everyone points to as models of dysfunction, California's bullet train chief among them, kept blowing through budgets and deadlines without ever laying meaningful track. The problem was never that rich people kept too much of their own money. The problem was a process that turns a train line into a decade-long permitting and lawsuit marathon before a single rail gets bolted down.

That's the irony the headline is getting at, and it's worth sitting with. Japan and France didn't out-build us because their top marginal tax rate was higher on some spreadsheet. They built because they could actually break ground and finish. We've had gas tax revenue, transportation earmarks, and stimulus money flowing for years, and the marquee project everyone cites as the American cautionary tale is still not done. Throwing another tax hike at that system doesn't fix the system. It just gives Washington a bigger number to mismanage the same way.

None of this means infrastructure spending is inherently wasteful or that fast trains are a bad idea. It means the excuse has gotten thin. If the last decade of federal rail spending taught us anything, it's that the bottleneck is regulatory, legal, and bureaucratic, not a shortage of revenue extracted from successful people. Buttigieg knows this. He ran the department. He watched the California project stall in real time. Pointing at tax rates instead of the process he oversaw isn't an analysis, it's a dodge, and voters who've watched this movie before are entitled to notice.