This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, June 19, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

President Obama wants billions to fund systems of so-called high-speed rail around the United States.

But those billions represent a mere down payment

on the plan, and the plan hasn't really been fleshed out yet, and Congress has yet to truly

put its stamp on it.

And that's more than a little troubling

to Cato Institute Senior Fellow Randall O'Toole.

Well, the White House says that high-speed rail

will revolutionize American travel the same way that President Eisenhower's

Interstate Highway System revolutionized American travel.

But there are several crucial differences between high speed rail and interstate highways.

First of all, before Congress allocated a single dime to interstate highways,

they got a pretty good idea from the Bureau of Public Roads

how much it was going to cost, where they were going to go, how they were going to pay

for it, and who was going to be served by Interstate Highways.

Congress has already allocated $8 billion to high-speed rail.

It has no idea how much it's going to cost. It has no idea

who's going to ride the trains. It has no idea where the money is going to come from. And

although we have a rough idea of where the trains are going to go, it turns out building the system

that President Obama has proposed is going to cost $90 billion or more than 11 times as much as Congress is already

allocated. So which fraction of that system where they're going to build with

...