Last December (seems like years ago today) thousands of protesters decried then Governor-elect Walker's decision to reject $810 million in federal dollars to construct a high-speed rail system in Wisconsin that would link Madison to Milwaukee and Chicago.


Protests were held not just in Madison and Milwaukee but in smaller towns like Waterloo that would gain economically from the rail investment. Among the suspect reasons that Mr. Walker gave for rejecting the aid was that the state couldn't afford the annual operating costs of the federal gift.


The amount that the state "couldn't afford" came to about $600,000 a year after federal matching subsidies. So the state ended up losing nearly a billion dollars of federal aid, thousands of engineering and construction jobs, a newly located train manufacturer in Milwaukee and countless dollars and jobs that would have occurred as a result of transit oriented development.


Rail proponents pointed out to Mr. Walker that we also stood to lose tens of millions of dollars that were badly needed for improvements to a section of state owned train tracks east of Madison as a part of the high-speed rail project.