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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by Murphy Siding [quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by futuremodal [quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by piouslion [quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by DSchmitt The Highway system is not subsidized. It is paid for by user fees. Fuel taxes excise taxes and fees paid by the automobile owners/users and truck owners. Local streets and roads are another matter. They are mainly paid for from local revenues: property taxes, sales taxes and sometimes special assesments (usually on developers) . If the auto never existed the Highway system would be much less developed, but local street and roads would still be necessary. [/quote]A Rose, is a Rose, is a Rose, by any other name. . . . . The same applies to taxes, subsidies and government grants. The all come from and are financed by the same form. Somebody's pocket, earnings of a business or realized interest and/or earnings on non tax exempt securities, sales taxes, user fees and a lots of other immaginative ways that governments have of getting more of what belongs to someone else, legally one has very little choice in but agreeing to pay no matter what its use may be. [/quote] A user fee is not a subsidy. They are not all financed by the same form. [/quote] Cool! So all passenger service could simply be paid for with *user fees*? Problem solved![;)] [/quote] In theory, yes, although I speculate that would require ticket prices to skyrocket so that most if not all of the costs were covered, and therein lies the problem. Amtrak's user fees aka it's ticket prices cover only a fraction of the total cost of government operated passenger rail service as defined by Amtrak's 1930's logistical mentality. Non Amtrak users are paying the rest, ergo most of Amtrak's operating costs are covered by non-user fees aka subsidies. And if Amtrak was forced to cover all it's operating costs via ticket sales or go out of business, well, we all know what would happen then. Now, if railroads were forced to participate in paying fuel taxes along with truckers and buses, with the railroads' portion returned as track construction/maintenance funds for tax exempt e.g. public by proxy ROW's, maybe a modern passenger rail operator could actually cover it's operating costs within the confines of ticket sales.
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