Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle, about to retire, really wants his state to dive into the passenger-train swamp. He wants it so badly, he's throwing $300 million into the murk in hopes the state's next governor feels duty-bound to chase it.

This matters outside Wisconsin. It's your money, for one thing: Wisconsin's plans for a high-speed train are predicated on vast sums of money taken from elsewhere by the Obama administration and sent here.

And the mechanism Doyle's using to lock his state into his pet project is exactly the one you'll see in other states when it comes to rail -- and in Washington for other unpopularities.

Doyle's dream is for a state-run passenger train from Milwaukee to Madison, an 85-mile trip untraversed by passenger trains now. The trains would hit peak speeds of 110 mph after 2016, fast enough to qualify for President Barack Obama's high-speed rail program. The $810 million grant to Wisconsin was among the largest from Obama's $8 billion train stash.

The plan ran into immediate turbulence. The state's own figures suggest taxpayers would be on the hook for $7 million a year to subsidize operating costs -- more like $10 million if the per-passenger loss comes only to the $26 per ride subsidy for Amtrak's popular Milwaukee-to-Chicago trains. The leading Republican looking to succeed Doyle, Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker, said he'd halt the project to spare such an unending drain. His Republican primary rival, ex-congressman Mark Neumann, said the same.

The annointee of Doyle's Democratic Party, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, favors the train.

Early on, Doyle's people said openly they'd try spending as much as they could before inauguration day next January. In March, insiders were guessing the state would have $57 million spent on the project by then: "I've never seen state bureaucrats move this fast on a project," one said. The aim was to make the train irrevocable, since the state would have to repay Washington any sums already spent if it cancelled the train.

By June, state officials said they'd spent or earmarked $100 million. Last weekend, the state transportation secretary said it will be $300 milllion by the end of the year. "Ripping up the tracks will cost Wisconsin taxpayers at least tens and tens of millions of dollars," a Barrett spokesman said.

You've got no choice but to flush away the rest, in other words. The project's been falling in the polls, and no wonder. The trip is projected to take about as long as driving, averaging 68 mph with stops. There's little congestion on the competing Interstate, and for those who don't drive, unsubsidized buses already offer frequent service.

Then there's the gulp-hard-and-round-up-to-a-billion price. Everyone knows it's an opening bid.

That's because the state and the Obama administration say so. Doyle's people for months have declared that Madison is just a way-station; the state really wants to extend the line 280 miles to Minneapolis-St. Paul. That itself is $2 billion at the rate of the Milwaukee-Madison line, and presumably would consume still higher operating subsidies.

The Madison line is just an early step in a vast web of such tracks centering on Chicago -- to St. Louis, Detroit, Indianapolis. Backers of this say it makes no sense to build one line and stop, and that's true. A train network works only as a network. Other proposals, in Texas, in Florida, elsewhere, are being sold similarly, as inevitable next steps.

And don't mention speed: Already, the passenger-train lobby is complaining that 110 mph isn't close to European standards. But to top 125 mph requires separate rail lines, with no freight trains, no crossings, no diesel. Such lines cost Europeans $40 million to $80 million per mile now. At that rate, Chicago to Minneapolis would cost $15 billion. When ridership proves anemic on our new 110 mph lines, we will be wheedled to spend such sums to salvage our investment with faster trains.

This is the ratchet that inflates government to Hindenburg scale. This is the mechanism of Vietnam escalation, the logic of casinos: Hey, sorry you lost, but you could win it all back with one more throw. You can't quit now.

And it is exactly the logic that we'll hear not only as the Obama administration scrambles to preserve its rail dreams. We'll hear this about the administration's really big deal, Obamacare. It's already law, after all. It's already offered protections, we'll hear -- guaranteed coverage, some subsidies -- and you can't repeal it now. In for a dime, in for dollar (or a trillion of them).

Humbug. The idea to hold in mind is that of "sunk costs," the fact that what you've irretrievably spent is gone, irrelevant to whether spending still more is a good idea or not. If you've blown $300 million on a pointless, duplicative waste, spending the rest of the $810 million only gets you a waste that's bigger, in need of regular feeding and prone to inflate into the billions.

If Wisconsin takes its retiring governor's frenzied spending as a costly lesson on waste and manipulation, it just may help spare the rest of the country from the much costlier inevitabilities that would follow.