> 10 billion can't do any of those things

Has CA actually spent that money on those problems and shown that it couldn't solve them? If not I don't think that statement is true?

The (current) upper bound on the cost of building a high-speed rail line from SF to LA is nearly $100 billion.

https://hsr.ca.gov/about/capital-costs-funding/

A statewide light rail system would probably run closer to a trillion dollars.

They could probably do the statewide light rail for $100 billion if private property rights were ignored. But $10 billion doesn't sound plausible. Maybe just the single already planned line could be built for $10 billion, if private property were ignored and the state did good planning.

To be fair, light rail is cheaper to build than high-speed rail. And if we are going to fantasy-land where the government can do things for the public good without caring about who it inconveniences right now, they could build light rail on land "the government" already owns: in cities dedicate lanes to public transit (as in light rail + bus), to go between cities take some highway space. Rail has much higher capacity than cars, so if you get public transit right this should actually decrease traffic after it's built.

Of course this makes it obvious why California can't do it for $10 billion, $100 billion or even $10 trillion: wherever you put your rail network it will inconvenience someone, and that causes massive delays and cost overruns, or makes the project politically untenable from the start. Even if you put the rail underground you would get massive protests from nearby residents because "poor people" can now get there easier.

$10 billion is roughly $6 per homeless person per year in California. How much are you expecting this one free cup of coffee per quarter to accomplish?

Wow, there are 1.7 billion homeless people in California?!

Are you saying that there are 42 million homeless people in California?

(10B / $6 / 4 quarters / 10 years)

Oops, yeah, that was a calculator fail. It should have been about $6k/year, but I dropped a factor of 1k. Which is still not much, but a bit more sensible.

They have a billion homeless people?

> 10 billion can't do any of those things. If it could, we'd have them.

How does that follow? There's plenty of reasons why there's no high speed rail in the US, none of them have to do with lack of money.

Good point, there are many reasons on top of the lack of money. Especially for the homeless issue.