On Spending for High Speed Rail

"We begin with the "against" position, defended by Holman Jenkins in a Wall Street Journal column from last week. Writing in response to both the high-speed rail collision in China and the debt ceiling talks, Jenkins blasts the entire U.S. high-speed rail program as a pointless political exercise in spending taxpayer money. He fails to offer any evidence for this position - unless you consider threats of terrorism, comparisons to the Post Office, and a strange attack on electric cars "evidence" - but he's quite certain that improvements to American passenger rail represent nothing more than 'spending money for the sake of spending money'."

On the other side, Matthew Yglesias at ThinkProgress argues for rail spending by arguing against war spending.