Tag: Amtrak

The Great Rail Robbery

It’s unclear “what problem Amtrak privatization proposals are intended to solve,” an Amtrak white paper argues.

The authors assert that “giving the United States the passenger rail system it needs will require substantial, assured, multi-year federal funding.…”

That flies in the face of experience. But if you are looking for a problem to solve, consider the biggest current story about Amtrak, its thieving employees.

Buckle up, for the rail gets bumpy: Sixty-one of 119 Amtrak employees exposed in 2022 for perpetrating a healthcare scam were kept on the job until a recent internal investigation.

For several years, these employees had collected kickbacks from doctors willing to file fake medical claims.

Amtrak now promises that it is (finally) cleaning house.

The organization’s inspector general says that the large number of employees “who cavalierly participated in this scheme to steal Amtrak’s funds suggests not only a serious lapse in basic ethics, but a troubling workforce culture … in which blatant criminal behavior was somehow normalized.”

A culture that DOGE has been finding in many governmental endeavors.

What governments lack are decent feedback mechanisms that real markets provide. Amtrak operates in a fake reality of “needs” — those infinite “needs” mentioned in the white paper against privatization.

Businesses succeed; businesses fail — and if the latter, they move aside to let others try to do better. But the white paper treats business failure as proof that government funding is mandatory.

For taxpayers, always on the hook for Amtrak failures, privatization is a solution.

Privatization would also mean less tolerance for keeping thieves on payrolls.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Amtrak, subsidy, trains, transportation

free trade & free markets general freedom too much government

Mass (Private) Transit

Washington D.C. metro, public transit, train

“Metro is dangling from a fiscal cliff,” hollers last Saturday’s Washington Post editorial headline. The “transit system faces a ‘death spiral’ starting next summer,” according to “the usually stolid pages of Metro’s financial projections.”

The Post informs that Metro’s “systemic budget problems have been compounded by pandemic-driven revenue shortfalls, inflation and the upcoming expiration of a federal bailout for transit systems.”

Oh, what a cruel turn of events, Washington’s ill-mannered and unsafe transit system needs a bailout from local politicians … because the current financial bailout it receives from federal taxpayers is about to fizzle out.

Life is tough.

Metro has only about 70 percent of the funding it needs, so get ready for blood-curdling cries of “drastic service cuts”— until or “unless the region’s elected officials, along with Congress, devise a fix,” The Post tells us.

Hell of a way to run a railroad — not earning a profit. Constantly failing customers and just as regularly begging for more money from politicians who get that moolah from folks like me … who rarely if ever use the mass transit we are told is so essential to us.

There’s a better way.

“Rail company Brightline began operating trains Friday from Miami to Orlando,” reports The Post, “using the fastest American trains outside the Northeast Corridor to become the first privately owned passenger operator to connect two major U.S. metropolitan areas in decades.

“The debut of the 235-mile, 3.5‑hour ride completes a $6 billion private investment in Florida.”

With speeds “quicker than Amtrak’s” and fares “comparable to Amtrak’s and competitive with airfare,” Brightline chief executive Michael Reininger talks of “the beginning of a new industry and a blueprint for expanding rail in America.”

Two approaches. One uses my tax dollars and fails. The other uses private investment.

And seems to be expanding.

Rather than complaining. And begging.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Amtrak, government and private enterprise, public transportation, public vs. private, trains

national politics & policies porkbarrel politics too much government

That’s What They Want

The political class sings monotone, striking one note ad nauseam.

The song is “Money.”

One night an Amtrak train crashes, with fatalities; early the next morning a crowded chorus argues for amped-up spending on “infrastructure.”

Sen. Bill Nelson (D‑Fla.) pled to the MSNBC lens, “Is it going to take more of these crashes and deaths to wake up the members of Congress who keep wanting to slim down the budgets going into infrastructure?”

Of course, no dollar amount is high enough that, if thrown at the problem, could guarantee no future accidents. Politicians want to toss the maximum moola at it, nonetheless.

Meanwhile, Baltimore smolders — and not because the Orioles won a World Series, but rather at the hands of rioters using protests sparked by the death of a man in police custody as their cover. To many, the tragic events call not so much for justice in court, or enacting law enforcement reforms, but for more “investment” in “urban areas” to solve the persistent problem of urban poverty.

“There’s been no effort to reinvest and rebuild in these communities,” President Obama claims.

Isn’t Obama the country’s head honcho? Did he not make any effort?

That’s funny, because an analysis by the Free Beacon finds that the City of Baltimore raked in $1.8 billion from the 2009 stimulus bill alone.

Doesn’t that count?

“Today, government spends 16 times more … than it did when the War on Poverty started,” wrote Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield in their Heritage Foundation paper, The War on Poverty After 50 Years. “But as welfare spending soared, the decline in poverty came to a grinding halt.”

But why quibble about results?

Just send more money.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Amtrak, infrastructure, spending

free trade & free markets too much government

Derailed

You gotta love trains. You gotta, you might say, since we all pay for them.

In taxes, subsidies.

The federal government’s Amtrak system loses $32 for every passenger — averaging all the routes. According to a recent Pew study, most lines of the system ran at a loss last year, many at a huge loss.

The Acela line, in the Washington, DC/Boston corridor, makes a profit of $40.50 per passenger, when depreciation costs are figured in. But most lines aren’t so solvent.

On the other end of the country, the Cascades line loses over $32 per passenger and the Coast Starlight squanders $100 more.

But these losses pale besides the Sunset Limited, from L.A. to New Orleans, which loses a whopping $462.11 per passenger.

Many of these routes should just be closed. People pay the full costs of car rides and plane rides, in droves, right now. There’s no reason to throw more money on “the problem” of routes that already suck up big bucks.

Were all routes sold off, line by line, private enterprise would abandon some — and make the rest profitable. Or go broke trying. But it wouldn’t be your dime going for the losses, unless you choose to invest in a post-Amtrak rail line.

Instead of this, the Obama administration threw a dozen billion bucks at high-speed rail.

That way we can go faster — go broke faster.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.