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Is GM the New Amtrak?
Dave Chidley, The Canadian Press / AP Photo
Taxpayers are still sinking billions of dollars into Amtrak—almost 40 years after buying it. Economist James Langenfeld says the bailout of GM could be an even bigger disaster.
Both Congress and the Obama administration apparently believe a bailout is best for GM, and that “what’s good for General Motors” is still good for America. So we taxpayers appear to be on the brink of owning most of GM. Do we know what we are buying, how long we will own it, and what it will really cost? Perhaps we can learn some lessons from another government owned company, the National Rail Passenger Corporation—aka Amtrak.
What we are buying is a greatly slimmed-down GM. The plans call for GM to cut its most unprofitable cars and focus on a core set of products. The unions, which faced a bigger downside if GM had gone into private bankruptcy, made concessions and got a sizable stake in the company. Top management has been replaced, but it is unclear how much the management structure that led to GM’s freefall will change.
Amtrak is now 38 years old, and in middle age shows no sign of moving out of the taxpayer’s house.
What taxpayers bought with Amtrak is not exactly the same, but it raises many issues about the future of GM. In the 1960s, private railroads wanted to dump their unprofitable intercity passenger service and concentrate on their more-profitable freight service. So in 1971 the U.S. government obliged them by creating Amtrak. There was no existing management structure, so one needed to be invented. The new management team was populated by former rail employees, former airline executives, and bureaucrats from places such as the U.S. Post Office. Amtrak had a government-affairs department rather than a finance department, which proved to be an omen: Train service was provided to states with powerful senators, even if this involved huge losses and few passengers.
The talk then was all about becoming profitable, but the reality has been anything but. Amtrak is now 38 years old, and in middle age shows no sign of moving out of the taxpayer’s house. The government gives Amtrak about $1.5 billion per year, not including an additional $1.3 billion from the recently passed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. These figures may seem small compared to the $50 billion recently plowed into GM, but Amtrak subsidies amount to $85,000 a year for each Amtrak employee, or about $35 every time Amtrak sells a ticket. Bottom line: It costs taxpayers about $1.40 for every $1 of revenue Amtrak takes in. And Amtrak is still mindful of the importance of its ties to Congress. Its Web site has an extensive "government affairs" section that conveniently lists Amtrak services by state, so senators can be sure to know what their state might lose if Amtrak is not fully funded.
President Obama and his administration seem to understand that creating another Amtrak is not promising. They speak in one voice about not wanting to run a car company, not planning on micromanaging the company, and selling the government's stake as soon as possible. All good thoughts, but these same officials cannot provide any timetable for getting out the car business. Moreover, there are early signs that GM may have many of the same problems that Amtrak has faced. Given the tone of some legislators in hearings this week, Congress appears ready to step in and prevent GM from rationalizing its dealer network. More political issues are likely to arise as more suppliers and workers are affected by the government-orchestrated GM bankruptcy. It seems unlikely that any congressional actions would help create a more competitive GM, and there is a real possibility that the $50 billion is only a down payment.
Can the administration avoid falling into a long-term commitment to GM? One real unknown is whether substantially the same management that put GM where it is today has the ability, imagination, and drive to return GM to its long-lost entrepreneurial roots. If so, and the government can avoid making political rather than economic decisions, then GM should survive and the Obama administration will get its wish to be out of the car business. If not, who will make the decisions to replace GM’s management? Congress? A new car czar? There is no good choice here, and we may very well end up with GMtrak.
Dr. James Langenfeld is a director at the economics consulting firm LECG and teaches at Loyola University Chicago. Previously he was a senior economist at General Motors and an analyst at Amtrak.
The Right Dumps Carrie
Jacob Bernstein is a senior reporter at The Daily Beast. Previously, he was a features writer at WWD and W Magazine. He has also written for New York magazine, Paper, and The Huffington Post.
Sarah Drops the Act
Tina Brown is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast. She is the author of the 2007 New York Times best seller The Diana Chronicles. Brown is the former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Talk magazines and host of CNBC's Topic A with Tina Brown.
Palin's Gold Mine
Duff McDonald is a contributing editor at New York magazine and a former contributing editor at Condé Nast Portfolio. His book, Last Man Standing, about Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, was published by Simon & Schuster in October.
That's not the best analogy. Passenger rail doesn't make money anywhere. It's subsidized in general because it's advantageous to have passenger rail. It cuts down on pollution and congestion and overcrowded airports. It's pure ideology to insist that transportation pay for itself.
I'm not defending silly routes through nowhere, but building high-speed rail in sensible places could be a good investment for the reasons mentioned.
Actually, it can cover its cost in the Northeast, which is a good example of why the Amtrak subsidy is such a terrible policy. They should end the subsidy completely, allow Amtrak to either go under or reduce its services to where people actually use it, mostly along the Northeast Corridor between Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington, DC, or turn those lines over to the states or another company that can handle it. As it stands, it is totally unworkable. Amtrak makes a vast majority of its revenue from this route but is obligated to pull from this revenue as well as its subsidy to maintain tracks and equipment in the rest of the country where the passenger volume doesn't justify its existence. And if not very many people are using it there, it's not doing much for the environment so that point is moot.
In the meantime they aren't spending the money to maintain the tracks and equipment on the core Northeast Corridor route where they get a majority of their traffic. I travel on this route every day and it's a near disaster. Almost every day they have delays from "Amtrak signal problems." In the meantime the state's own transit systems do more traffic on their lines than Amtrak does but because of this subsidy, Amtrak maintains ownership and priority over them, which just compounds the problem. The states could do a better job maintaining these lines because they are getting the traffic volume to justify their maintenance. Instead, Amtrak takes priority for its trains which compounds delays for everyone. On top of that, the service isn't even cost effective. It cost more to take an Amtrak train from NY to DC than to get a flight.
Amtrak is a textbook example of a vicious cycle of government subsidy - they beg Congress for money, Congress gives it with strings attached to maintain unjustified service in all their districts and Amtrak gives itself into a deeper hole providing it despite the lack of business justification. It will never be broken until the shut-down Amtrak and let the private market or state's with heavy rail transit systems take over the profitable routes and ditch the rest. The sooner the better.
Over on the West Coast, at least from (Eugene OR to probably Seattle),don't know about California, CSX controls the rails, Amtrak pulls over for them. Go figure.
California has a rail system that is highly effective and used much. (At least in the south)
Hawnzz,
Are you referring to the derailment happy Metrolink system?
It's underutilized (at least by Northeast Corridor standards) and the safety standards are abysmal!
Bad example to cite!
I don't know WHY some American liberals and leftists have this passenger railroad fetish!
The passenger car and the motor truck - and the highway networks that serve them - are one of the reasons that American industry is so flexible and efficient.
Why do some folks want to go back to the past and dredge up the railroad?
Look, railroads are good at hauling bulk cargo along fixed routes - like coal from the strip mines of Wyoming to the thermal power plants of Chicago.
But as a means of long range passenger transport their day has come and gone.
Back in the 1950's, the Airlines took the top end of the long haul passenger market, the car took the middle and the Greyhound and Trailways buses took the bottom end.
I think the feds should wind down AMTRAK - keep the profitable routes (northeast corridor, Los Angeles to San Francisco, New York to Chicago) wind down the rest of the "train to nowhere" service, negotiate a severance deal with the United Transportation Union and the Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen's division of the Teamsters so the high seniority railroad workers get to take a decent early retirement and the young workers get a decent severance settlement, long term unemployment benefits and reemployment and retraining assistance and then, once the carrier only operates the profitable routes, find a buyer (perhaps Union Pacific, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, CSX or Norfolk Southern - the nation's biggest and most profitable railroad) and get out of the railroad business
Well said.
Exactly, and don't forget the enormous soft subsidies that make up the outlay for the airline industry through tax payer supported airports, surrounding infrastructure, FAA, etc., and have always been underpinned to the automobile and trucking industry through road construction.
Is Amtrak such a bad deal anyway? As the previous commenter stated it is not really a good analogy either. It seems highly likely that GM will be divested from the government portfolio once, and admittedly if, it gets back on its feet, but the same can be said for the much larger banking and insurance company government interventions..
Yes, and why shouldn't GM start building those rail cars for the high-speed transport. The cars for the Wash DC Metro initially were imported from Italy and made by Ferrari. Don't know if they still are, but at any rate they are probably still imported.
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No, I wish, but they are first class, and have the mustang logo. Only problem, I think they had a tendency to catch fire. Probably have solved that little problem.
Problem - GM was set up to build 10 million cars a year.
The entire world market for railcars is less than that.
Plus, there already are companies that make railcars - Kawasaki Railcar USA in Yonkers, Bombardier in Vermont and Quebec, Pullman Standard in Pennsylvania and Alabama - so GM entering the railcar market would, best case scenario, drive them out of business and put their employees on the unemployment line, and, worst case scenario, be yet another GM fiasco.
I am not talking about old timey railroad cars. No imagination.
I also think Bombardier has its hands full with its jet industry etc. and foreign business. Might welcome the competition.
cbeenthere,
NOBODY "welcomes" competition!
I'm quite sure that Bombardier has quite enough competition from Kawasaki and Pullman Standard!
How wrong can you be? High speed rail is one of the best investments we could make . In terms of consuming energy, it is some 10 times more efficient than road and where would our cities be without commuter rail? Even commuter rail as archaic as ours by comparison with Japan, say. For an economist, Mr Langerfeld is surprisingly unsophisticated in rolling out the "losses" without reference to who pays for what and the returns (who pays for all the huge investment in roads, signalling, bridges, deaths, etc. ? There's taxpayer subsidy to talk about! But what should we expect from someone who has been with GM. Truth is the road lobby is powerful and distorts the allocation of scarce resources and naive attacks on Amtrak just further the nonsense..
"where would our cities be without commuter rail?"
Get outside New York City much?
Most American cities DON'T HAVE COMMUTER RAIL - because the suburban and exurban residential patterns are too dispersed for it to make sense.
Yeah, maybe Japan has a dense network of commuter trains - but that's because Japan is a very small country, and Japanese people live in tiny homes jammed right next to each other within walking distance of train stations.
Americans don't want to live like that - do you want to force them to, all in the name of "environmentalism"?
Progress is going on despite naysayers. Portland Oregon has and is continuing its state of the art Max lightrail. WashDC would be a living hell without the Metro and other systems; despite the constant bitching of its users. Have you driven the famed Beltway lately? Urban areas mid size and large cities(little Japans) have benefited mightily from this idea called progress. People don't want to be forced to spend a life idling in the grand automobile on grand congested highways.
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The nation's trucking industry pays massive road and fuel taxes - and there are also substantial fuel taxes paid by the nation's motorists - and that's what pays for the nation's highway system.
Maybe you can tell me why the state of Georgia needed funds to put three lanes of I-95 along their brief coast? That is where the waste is.
John North & Wittgenstein:
Comparing Amtrak to a high speed rail system is like comparing a bullet to throwing a rock, think about it you have spent more money keeping the Amtrak system expermenting with improving, and Amtrak figuring ways to keep getting subsidised, not good.
Go take a trip on Amtrak, you can count on two things , it will be slow, and inefficient.
Add that to freight trains we subsidised and we will never get a High Speed system in this country.
Optive word subsidies.
Hard to explain to someone in rural Kansas why they should pay for someone elses transportation in Chicago.
Amtrak is a pig, put the money into a real system, not this money pit.
You are taking out of context. Numbers are often cherry-picked. What we spend on Amtrak is little in relation to what we spend on roads, the excess energy we use to keep our oil habbit going. We never think twice about propping up other industries of every kind. I could list them, but I'd be here all day. Every first world nation has a decent rail system. Why is the U.S. always so backwards on so many important things? We had one until the 1940s... why can't we have one now?
Because they and their children are most likely going to have to move to those big cities when they want a better job. There is not exactly a population boom in the midwest right now.
And if you have the I-only-want-to-pay-for-things-I'm-using mindset then I don't see why people in big cities should pay for farm subsidies that go places like oh I do know...Kansas.
People in rural Kansas don't pay the taxes that put rails in Chicago. People in New York and Chicago pay the taxes that build the roads in rural Kansas.
Only the big, rich states pay more taxes than the services they get, despite what the people in Sarah Palin's "real America" think.
People in rural areas don't pay enough taxes to support their own, minor infrastructure.
Is GM the new ConRail?
In 1974 the US Congress took over the bankrupt American freight rail companies. This was, of course, opposed by the Republican 'No Party', who said at the time, "If you like the US Postal Service, you'll love ConRail".
Much to the GOP's disappointment, ConRail became profitable in 1981. In 1987 Uncle Sam sold off ConRail for a cool $1,900,000,000.
I predict the GM bailout will end up an even better deal for this country.
This might be a tad off topic, but I believe it is worth a discussion. This sale by Chrysler was illegal, unconstitutional and supplanted the legal rights of secured bondholders. It will be over turned in the USA Supreme Court. You see Obama's administration has completely ignored the rule of laws governing commerce and bankruptcy, by allowing, unsecured debtors to be place in front of secured debtors plus further have a percentage of ownership. All such behind the scenes dealings are completely illegal and unconstitutional and will be over turned in the courts. Obama and his administration thus could face the possibility of further legal actions against all of them for not abiding by the rule of laws and the constitution, assuming the United States remains a country committed to the laws and one of illegal political decisions....
The Auto Bailouts Have Been Mishandled!
The song video by John Rich "Shuttin' Detroit Down" sums up everything:
http://www.cmt.com/videos/john-rich-country/367274/shuttin-detroit-down .jhtml
Hopefully, GM & Chrysler will turnaround quickly.
Mark Memoly
Missouri Will Show The Way!
Kansas City
mmemoly@gmail.com
Keep Memoly In Your Memory!
2010 Republican Candidate For The US Senate From Missouri
We need mass transit going everywhere, and at every station, car rentals to get you home. We have the technology to produce an electric car that could carry you five miles from the station to your house, and then, without a driver, return to the station.
The following program could generate the sale at sticker for an additional one million cars per year, and could run successfully for at least a couple, three years, at no cost to the taxpayer:
This is an essay by Michael Stephen Levinson, the only poet ever to be banned by The Daily Beast.
"In 1980 I was a write-in candidate for president. At that time our domestic automobile industry was being eaten alive by foreign producers. The Japanese were exporting fuel efficient cars by the boatload.
The following is also a letter to the editor sent to many "noose papers" as an essay for op-ed, which I first talked about in that 1980 election. I say to all the readers, you can copy and run with this essay, edit the piece, whatever you want to do. I'd like it to be the first in a series of published articles, but that is neither here nor there.
I bring to the table innovative solutions and a memorable writing style. Visit www.michaelslevinson.com to uncover more.
The important thing is the solution. Older inefficient cars will go off the road and a couple million jobs will be, in the short term saved. We need that!
The National Car-Lotto
I want the car czar job because I like the rhyme, the fame and I need a job. Here is my plan to counter Chrysler's and GM's bankruptcy - to at least temporarily rejuvenate our American automobile industry without any further government intervention.
As "industry appointed" car czar, (the govt.'s domestic counter intelligence bureaucracy hates me) I will organize a national car-lotto raffle, with tickets sold nationwide wherever lotto tickets are sold.
Car-lotto raffle tickets will go for one dollar. A winning ticket gets the GM or Chrysler of your choice, with taxes, tag, dealer fees and extended warranty included. One dollar covers every thing in the sale!
Income tax liability will be forgiven until such time as you sell or trade the car, that by a simple non-partisan act of Congress. Our goal, with an advertising blizzard on radio, and TV, is 30,000 yet to be built cars raffled every week, as soon as we clear the cars currently in stock on the lots!
The lotto-raffle winner goes to their favorite dealership. The sales commission on the sticker price is divided amongst the sales force so every "buddy" benefits. In this manner, the future of America's car companies is in the hands of we, the people, not Washington, DC bureaucrats.
Chrysler's Sebring convertible is the sharpest convertible built in USA. Were it announced that Chrysler was finished and the last ten thousand Sebring Convertibles were being sold via raffle ticket, every one of those tickets would be gone in an hour!
But people will hold off, in the light of bankruptcy, waiting for a fire sale. Cable TV's blabberific squawking heads don't get it.
I believe that facing the demise of General Motors and Chrysler, millions of people would purchase a car-lotto raffle ticket every week, to win their favorite car. Upon winning you visit the dealership with your winning ticket in hand and order exactly the car and color you want.
I hold millions of people who can't afford to purchase a new car but can afford to operate a car would purchase car-lotto raffle tickets regardless every week. All of the millions of people who purchase scratch offs and lotto tickets would certainly earmark a dollar or two each week for a car-lotto raffle ticket as the odds of winning a brand new state of the art car are so much better then winning the lotto!
GM would have one million Volts pre-sold before their first car rolled off the line. We should include the all-electric Silicon Valley Tesla, to!
Instead of Obama's bureaucrats deciding which companies are to survive in the collapsing world "e con oh me," we, the people would be the deciders on what cars we drive.
My car-lotto national raffle program will pre-sell 30,000 new American made cars every week, the money on hold, after all the inventory on all the lots is rolled. Each and every car will be loaded with the latest state of the art features, too. The beauty in this: so many of the car-lotto winners will be people who drive but are not in the market to purchase a new car, much as they'd love to have one.
Those people who are planning on a new car, in spite of today's "e con oh me," aren't going to hold off until they win one in the car-lotto. They will simply go around to the dealerships and negotiate their best deal. In a troubled world market, our auto industry will survive from the good faith of the car-lotto raffle ticket purchasing American public.
Here is our president, Barky 'Good Wrench' Obama, on TV Monday, March 30, barking his approach to killing off GM and Chrysler. I paraphrase President Obama:
"Its time we make the automobile industry dependent on the unending flow of American raffle dollars."
So why don't we move on this car-lotto idea and give our car industry a chance to renegotiate fresh rolls in a permanently altered world "e con oh me?" I want to be industry appointed, the car czar guy on the TV ads exhorting everyone to purchase their car-lotto raffle ticket, and make the talk show rounds, pushing our new car for a dollar raffle, which is the only prob limb!
The only hinderance to publishing the above is that it is my idea and I am a candidate for president. I have been a candidate for president since I was four years old and I cannot see any reason to set aside my goal for achieving world peace and food chain harmony, just because J. Edgarina, the fascist Pervert of Dirt put me from the middle to the top of his domestic list, in 1970.
Once you get past that minor detail, the continuing policy of J. Edgarina's descendants, you have a winning program. More than one million jobs will be saved from this program! The car-lotto effect will positively ripple through the whole "e con oh me." The only people who could be against this program are the decendent followers of J. Edgarina, the pervert of dirt who marked me down as a person of interest in 1969.
What are you on?
Please, get me some.
Dear FoolsLogos,
Visit michaelslevinson.com and / or youtube.com/poetprophet and then you will be 'on.'
Stick around for awhile, I did and now I can't tear myself away Fools.
Yeah, the only poet ever to be banned by the Daily Beast!
Is GM the new Conrail? http://www.lestout.com/article/news-society/world-news/is_gm-the-new-conrai l.html
When I was a kid, after WW II we had a freight and passenger rail system. Free enterprise, without too much ethics, or planning, let our rail system die and thee auto and oil lobby get the majority of the transportation money. So, we have low mileage cars and trucks instead of high mileage rail shipping our cars and trucks on the long hauls. We recently took the auto train from Florida and enjoyed it. I noted we had to slow down a lot for the tracks that were swaying the train too much. Free enterprise and money in politics without ethics has made a mess. We need to get rid of the gerrymandered districts, go to all public and or government finance of elections. And we need a carbon tax to fund our infrastructure instead of another Enron cap and trade without ethics.
correct. Visit youtube.com/poetprophet and go from there.
The countries where high speed rail works are vastly different than the US. The truth of the matter is the US is a big empty place for the most part. Some parts are more dense than others population wise but on the whole it is mostly empty in comparison to places where high speed trains are used.
For the most part, the folks making comments here are completely missing the point of the article. Obama's takeover of GM is putting the taxpayer on the hook for 50 billion dollars now, and many more billions later. GM hasn't made a profit in many years. It isn't likely to make a profit under government management.....already Barney Frank has successfully pressured GM to keep a facility open his district, and the government doesn't even officially own GM yet.
The whole idea that GM will suddenly become profitable is a fantasy. Thanks to Obama, the taxpayer has already ponied up $1,500,000 PER JOB at GM, and the ripoff is just beginning.
Its amazing there are all these posts and nothing new was said.
If Amtrak was as bad as some who post here believe it would be gone already. I live 2 hrs south of Chicago in the middle of a corn field. I have family in Chicago so I drive 10 minutes to the train station and ride it to Chicago once a month.
Amtrak is used by millions of people every day.
America is great as a country because we have each other. If we were divided into a bunch of small countries like so many of you want we would be much worse off.
I can understand being nervous about investing 50 billion to in GM but I think it is necessary. But, I thought invading Iraq was necessary at one point too.
Time will tell.
Remember media is the inventor of fear mongering!
That's dumb logic. Amtrak is still around because the government keeps using our tax dollars to keep it afloat. That is a point of fact. You can argue whether there is some logistical, social or miltary defense justification for that versus letting it go under, but you can't argue it has survived on its own merit or it wouldn't be losing massive money, year after year, for decades now.
Why is it that subsidies are bad for railroads, but okay for Airlines and highways for single passenger cars? Calculate that, for once.
Good question.
How much would an airline ticket cost if there was no AmTrack rail line ?
Don't insult Amtrak! It does just as well as your car does. Your car is the must subsidized money-loser on the earth. Every road you drive on is CAR WELFARE, AUTOMOBILE WELFARE. It's funny, I'm from Orange County which runs off an upper-middle class kind of welfare called "The Price Rigged, No-Bid World Of Defense Contracting," which is the biggest welfare gig running. Amtrak mooches only a billionth of what bomb makers do. Amtrak mooches only a fragment of what you car-drivers do. Plus, by the way, airlines don't make money either, which is why the vast majority of them go bankrupt. Why do you hold Amtrak up to standards that you don't hold cars up to. Cars suck up tax money by welfare road money for you. Why do you hold Amtrak up to standars that you don't hold airlines up to? Airlines are the biggest leeches on the planet. Who pays for those control towers? THE TAX PAYER. Why is not AIRLINE WELFARE considered welfare. You see, the problem with you conservative, smug yuppies is that you live off ten times the welfare the average actual welfare recipient lives off of. You just think your welfare doesn't count as welfare because you're a football fan, because you own a truck, because you work at a defense contractor and are a real man. Somehow "real man welfare" isn't welfare, right? You're such total hypocrites. I grew up in Orange County in this ocean of self-serving hypocrisy. Everyone in Orange County milks the government for $200,000 a year and then panics if some guys rides a subsidized train or gets a $600 SSI check. The heartless lying you people engage in is just shocking. The world may believe your mythological trash, but I grew up with you liars. And trust me, you don't work for a living either. You never saw a bigger bunch of drunken, lazy leeches than the world of Conservatives I grew up with. Somehow, because their industries, which all just sucked the government dry, were "special" and "exempt" from the welfare label. Transit is not a money maker for any government. Roads are a money drain, supporting the airline infrastructure is a money drain, and yes, trains are too. Although Amtrak is, by far the best deal of them all. I've ridden Amtrak for tens of thousands of miles. Of course you conservatives probably just don't like Amtrak because the seats aren't as big as your piggish SUV. Too bad you greedy hogs! And, by the way, you'll continue to lose elections because the world is tuning into the fact that it's not Amtrak riders that are sucking the life blood out of the world, nor is it people getting $79 in Food Stamps. It's you! Your whole class of people that lacks the human capacity for self-reflection. You who have no discipline whatsoever and can't stop your piggish addiction to hand-over-fist exploitation and world slavery. How dare you insult Amtrak! Not a single one of you is morally fit to set foot on an Amtrak train. And yes, I'd rather have the government run GM. What GM did was destroy mass transit and build massive, hoggish, gas-guzzling, piece-of-trash mega-trucks for overweight, brainwashed, fast-food addicts with no intellectual lives whatsoever. Amtrak is full of flaws, but those flaws don't amount to the tenth of the utter corruption of the hacks that still defend the American business view of the world, which is a baron's view of the world, which is really a Royalist view of the world, but, instead of a queen, money is on their throne, and they feel nothing for the masses they kill by the grinding onward of their corporate machines.
Dear MelvinBrand,
Whether or not you mean to be funny, some of your sentences are really fun. For example, "What GM did was destroy mass transit and build massive, hoggish, gas-guzzling, piece-of-trash mega-trucks for overweight, brainwashed, fast-food addicts with no intellectual lives whatsoever."
Very robust. But most of the steady posters did not read it. Paragraphs. You need to divide your prose when you shift your thoughts.
I am quite sure most every one simply skipped your tirade for that reason.
MelvinBrand:
Agreed. You make some excellent points wrt Amtrak and welfare. Yes it is very clear that 'work' to some people has nothing to do with the meaning of the word! Just a bunch of bloated Ponzers scamming everyone.
I just cannot get myself to think that we should give GM money, or the banks for that matter, but do completely see that welfare in the U.S. is entirely a matter of perception! GM should live and die by its own sword (as should the banks!).
Amtrak is the seventh largest carrier of any kind, including airlines. And airlines are the biggest money-losers on earth, which is why they all go bankrupt. Plus, cars are subsidized ten times more than trains, since you car drivers are living on the roads that I call CAR-WELFARE. And airlines survive because a vast air-control network is given to them for free, paid for by me, and I call that AIRLINE WELFARE. The truth is, the writer just hates poor people. Poorer people need trains, and he hates it when anything nice comes to us. I grew up in evil Orange County that lives off mooching off the government through overpriced, price-rigged defense contracting. But they too, don't like it when their welfare gets labeled as welfare. Rich people don't think their welfare is welfare, since, after all, they're special. The baron class is just so smug that they live comfortably in their hypocrisy. They have hundreds of billions for their wars. They get hundreds of billions from us for their banks. And yet they go into spasms because a poor person gets a $600 check. What a bunch of heartless frauds our upper-middle class has become. No public train line on earth has ever made money and no private train line can now make money. It's called a public service. But your self-congratulatory upper-class mooches that feed off of us lower-middle class tax payers have relabeled your piggest mooching as "hard-earned money by self-made people." It's a lie. You're all living off the Feds, and you don't want to share. You football jock, CEOs are the same bullies that beat kids up on the playground and got away with it, and now you've stolen all our money and gotten away with it. And now you want to take our train system too? Sorry, no way. And you farmers with your ten thousand acres. You're living off the government too. And just because you wear a cowboy hat and drive and old truck doesn't make you a simple average fella. You're worth millions, so stop with the fake "simple folk" fraud. Amtrak is better than you'll ever be in a million years and a thousand lifetimes.
Mel C. Thompson.
Great article!
Americans want socialism and they elected the folks to give it to them; nothing to do but go on vacation for 20 years and come back and pick up the pieces.
The America, 20 years from now, will not be recognizable to most of us - look at what's changed in a few months. Americans seem to be happy with what's going on and must see, first hand, how socialism destroys individuals and nations.
In the mean time buckle up, buy gold, and wait for hyper-inflation to reduce our great country to a place where folks die trying to escape. That gold is the only thing that will save your family. Don't put it in banks where the government can confiscate it.
You've been warned...
I don't necessarily agree with this artical's analogy of Amtrak (specifically the nuance differences in core business and technology), but I do agree with the end message; we're in trouble.
Not only is the gov getting into a business they know nothing about, they're getting into it at a pivotal time when innovation is clearly necessary with both product development and the antiquated supply chain mgmt models used by the autos.
I can tell you first hand that the majority of the GM executive management responsible for poor decision making have not been removed. GM may be putting on a new body, tires and paint, but it's the same ol' clunker under the hood.
Some people are confusing being against Amtrak with being anti-mass transit. One has nothing to do with each other. I use a train every day to commute to/from work, then walk the final mile each way. I love train transportation. But Amtrak sucks. I can be pro effective mass transit and anti the joke of a dinosaur called Amtrak.
Real commuters don't use Amtrak anyway because despite all our tax dollars, they still don't competitively price the service. And they have a lousy on time record and provide poor service. And they can't blame it on the weather or the tracks because even where they share the same routes with other state transit systems, the state systems have better records and much cheaper service. Where Amtrak is the only option it also tends to be highly under utilized. What's the point of forcing it to remain where it is hardly used?
Amtrak should go away and instead we should invest appropriately in actually useful, working and effective mass transit solutions. I actually think the opposite is true. I suspect those rallying to Amtrak's defense on some principle of mass transit versus car use don't actually commute by train on a daily basis and probably use Amtrak rarely if ever. As someone who uses both, I can say that it isn't worth defending and is in fact undermining better mass transit solutions. When NJ transit along the Northeast Corridor is not on time, a vast majority of the time it is due to problems caused by Amtrak. And I used to commute on Amtrak daily and was amazed how much better the experience was once I switched to NJ Transit (itself not a great service, just better by comparison).
What is the U.S.? Capitalist or socialist? That is the issue here. Are we supposed to bail out everyone who is 'too big to fail' in the bad times but they go on their merry way making threats and getting tax breaks and taking business to other countries in the good times?
The entire stock market system is crap because companies can grow without doing a stinking thing, contributing to society and don't actually even have to have a product, just the perception of one. Blue chip my ass...
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