Don’t know about the NYC project, but the Big Dig makes your point pretty well.
Obama’s stimulus plan was a great idea, in theory, very sound social engineering - use government money to help people insulate their houses, thus saving fuel, in effect helping myriads of individual American families a little bit to make a big punch in the face to oil-funded international political instability and leave more money in the pockets of the people who are most likely to spend locally. Tax dollars spent to grow the tax base and achieve foreign policy goals, brilliant! But in Delaware the rollout was so obscenely corrupt… in our case the contractor came out and spec’ed the job, then filed the paperwork to say they’d done it and got their subsidy dollars, then folded up their LLC and slipped away into the night, never to be seen again.
I guess that was a long winded way of agreeing with you. Theory’s great, but implementation is where projects fail, after all.
Still and all, not trying guarantees failure to achieve, y’know?
