The Bay Area is about to get fleeced again. Politicians and their cronies are pushing a massive 14-year, $14 billion sales tax to “save” the broken BART system. Sound familiar? It’s the exact same grift that turned California’s High Speed Rail into a billion-dollar black hole. More tax money will never fix these disasters. It only lines the pockets of politically connected contractors, overpaid consultants, greedy developers, and union insiders who laugh all the way to the bank while commuters suffer. Enough is enough!
Bart’s Crisis Is Completely Self-Made
BART wasn’t always this pathetic. Before the pandemic, fares covered about three-quarters of every trip’s cost. Riders paid their way and forced some discipline on spending. Then COVID hit, remote work exploded, and ridership crashed down a staggering 57 percent by 2024. Did BART tighten its belt? Hell no. Operating costs ballooned to $883 million a year, with labor eating three-quarters of that pie. Labor costs alone skyrocketed more than $170 million—nearly 30 percent higher—while trains ran emptier than ever. This is not bad luck. This is deliberate incompetence dressed up as a crisis.
California High Speed Rail: The Ultimate Proof Of The Grift
Don’t let them fool you—this pattern is statewide. California’s High Speed Rail was sold as a green dream connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco. Billions upon billions poured in, costs exploded past $100 billion, and what do we have? A tiny test track in the Central Valley and endless delays. Who wins? The same cast of characters: contractors with insider bids, consultants billing hours like it’s free money, developers cashing in on adjacent real estate, and unions locking in bloated contracts. Riders? Still stuck in traffic. Taxpayers? Getting robbed blind. BART’s bailout is just High Speed Rail 2.0—same corruption, different tracks.
Sales Taxes Are A Regressive Hammer On Working Families
Here’s the dirtiest trick: a region-wide sales tax. It sounds fair because “everyone pays.” Bullshit. It hammers low-income families hardest. Diapers, groceries, school clothes, tires—every essential purchase gets taxed more. The Bay Area already suffers from sky-high rates: Oakland at 10.75 percent, Santa Clara climbing toward 10 percent, San Francisco chasing another full-point hike. County budgets are bleeding, yet the political class keeps layering on new taxes instead of fixing the waste. This isn’t an investment. It’s punishment for the little guy while the elite insiders feast.
The Toxic Green Union Alliance Destroying Transit
At the rotten core is the unholy alliance between climate zealots and public employee unions. Greens demand fewer cars; unions demand bigger payrolls and ironclad contracts. Together, they created a captured system where payroll trumps passengers. Labor protections and union control over BART board elections make real cuts impossible. The result? A bloated bureaucracy that treats falling ridership as an excuse for permanent subsidies instead of a wake-up call to shrink, automate, and modernize.
Fearmongering Threats Are No Substitute For Reform
Watch for the panic buttons: “Service cuts! Stations closing! Death spiral!” It’s all theater. Real leaders would first show a plan—workforce reductions, overtime slashes, procurement overhauls, automation benchmarks that could slash costs nearly in half, as driverless systems do in other cities. But no. There are zero accountability measures attached to this tax grab. They want your money with no strings, no changes, no consequences. That’s not governance. That’s extortion.
Bottom Line
Voters must crush this $14 billion BART tax scam at the ballot box. More cash for broken, corrupt projects like BART and California’s High-Speed Rail will never deliver reliable transit—it only rewards the politically connected contractors, consultants, developers, and union employees who created the mess. Reject it outright. Force real reinvention: smaller, smarter, automated systems that actually serve riders instead of special interests. Anything less is just another taxpayer mugging. Say no—and make them finally feel the pain they’ve inflicted for years.
We are being scammed.
— Steve
