Quoting from the linked article, “In October 2008, Joseph Vranich, a preeminent authority on high-speed rail in the United States, testified before a hearing of California’s State Senate Transportation and Housing Committee. Vranich, the best-selling author of Supertrains and a 40-year advocate of high-speed rail, had come to offer his thoughts on the state’s plan to build a high-speed rail line from Orange County to San Francisco. “This is the first time I am unable to endorse a high-speed rail plan,” he told the senators, saying that he found the California High Speed Rail Authority’s work to be “the poorest I have ever seen.” “

This is how things go wrong when it’s the government spending. Nobody seems to care if it’s all waste spending, just so it’s spending. And so, the projects fail, one after the other. Real resources are squandered.

Again from the article:

““The authority’s projection of 117 million annual intercity passengers plus commuters is so far from reality that I have to call it what it is—science fiction,” Vranich wrote in his testimony. “

This is how you impoverish a state, and writ large, this stuff can impoverish a nation.