The State of California

  How Aspiration Replaced Arithmetic BLUF: California's high-speed rail project, championed by Governors Brown and Newsom as a transformative vision inspired by China's success, has become a textbook case of Austrian business cycle theory malinvestment in a state chronically unable to manage its own budget. The project was sold to voters on systematically false financial projections ($33 billion), has now ballooned to $126 billion with no operational service, survives only through federal grants the Trump administration has terminated, and diverts resources from a state facing recurring structural deficits of $15–35 billion annually. What began as aspiration has become an albatross that exemplifies how government-directed capital, divorced from market discipline, produces civilization-scale waste. The Vision That Consumed a State's Future In November 2008, Californians approved Proposition 1A with 53% of the vote, authorizing $9.95 billion in state bonds for high-speed...

California kids are going without vision care, and the problem is getting worse | KPBS Public Media Blind Spots: How Broken Insurance Leaves Millions of Americans Without the Vision Care They Need From schoolchildren misdiagnosed as behavioral problems to seniors who cannot read their medication labels, the gap between what is legally required and what is actually delivered is widening – with consequences for learning, independence, and quality of life. New technology offers partial bridges across this gap, but system reform remains essential.   BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT (BLUF): America faces a compounding vision care crisis. Myopia now affects an estimated 36% of U.S. children and is projected to worsen, yet only 16% of Medi-Cal-enrolled California children saw an eye doctor between 2022 and 2024. The coverage system is structurally broken at both ends of the age spectrum: Medicaid mandates eye care for children but provider reimbursement rates are so low that on...