Edit post

Edit your reply below.

Post Body
Enter your post below.
[quote user="John WR"] I made a typo, Sam.  The date is 2007, not 2001.  But Cato reports there are similar amounts every year.   Frankly, I think we are a complex society and the entanglements of the public and private sectors taken as a whole do after all give us our $15.1 trillion economy so I find it hard to go to the mat to oppose these entanglements.  That is why I refer to an organization like Cato.   You had rebuked Henry for his lack of facts.  The Cato site is the closest I could come to add some facts to the discussion which is why I used it.  But I can understand that you find it pretty tedious to go through.   If, as you suggest, 93 billion is pretty small potatoes compared to the whole economy it is hard for me to see a good reason to go after Amtrak.  [/quote] The first post dealt with fuel taxes paid by truckers vs. the property taxes paid by the railroads.The author claimed that excluding the diesel burned by the nation's railroads did not constitute a subsidy. I don't recall saying anything about Amtrak. Summarize what Cato said. Include an analysis of the statistical methodogy used to obtain the information. I don't find anything too tedious to go through as long as it is factual and based on relevant methodology; 2007 data is five years old. Less dated than 2001, but still getting long in the tooth. I seldom rely on the data published by a partisan institution, i.e. Cato, Brookings, NARP, etc. I almost always go to the primary data base, i.e. IRS, Amtrak, FRA, DOT, Highway Trust Fund, etc., download the data into a spreadsheet, and slice and dice it. That way I get the data without having it filtered by a partisan organization. The reason to question the subsidies paid to Amtrak is because of the amount per passenger mile. They are the highest transport subsidies by as much as 20 times those for other modes of transport. That's in my spread sheets. In part, because of these subsidies, Amtrak runs long distance trains that carry less than one per cent of intercity travelers, which is not the best allocation of the country's resources. Moreover they add up.  Since its inception Amtrak has lost more than $28 billion. This information can be found in the Amtrak FY11 financials if you want to verify it.  The key question is where does passenger rail make sense?  What should it look like and how should it be funded?
Tags (Optional)
Tags are keywords that get attached to your post. They are used to categorize your submission and make it easier to search for. To add tags to your post type a tag into the box below and click the "Add Tag" button.
Add Tag