Saturday, July 09, 2011

San Fran Realism

It seems it's California / China day here at KPC

The San Francisco - Oakland Bay Bridge half of which is in Nancy Pelosi’s 8th Congressional district is being rebuilt.

Governor Jerry Brown has decided that CA has to build the bridge without Federal Funding. Why would he do that?

Because...the buy American provisions of the USDOT would prohibit using Chinese Steel.

And using the cheaper steel saves more than the fed funding would save. Using Chinese steel is expected to save $400,000,000 on the $7,200,000,000 Bridge. The Bridge financing is made possible by two key aspects. First, the 270,000 vehicles per day on the bridge pay $6 per crossing during peak hours to $4 in the off peak currently. These user fees provide a substantial share of funding.

The second aspect is that the federal funds are not lost but can be applied to myriad of other California projects that are eligible for federal funding with much smaller surcharges for protectionism, allowing some reallocation of state user taxes to be used in rebuilding the Bay Bridge.


So...when it suits him, Jerry boy is a right capitalist, shi?

(With thanks to JS, who wrote in)

1 comment:

Mike said...

I don't think you can call Gov. Moonbeam a capitalist just yet. He is, however, certainly responding well to incentives.