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Amtrak is not an unfunded liability. At least not in the sense that Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, military retirement, federal retirement, student loans, etc. are unfunded.   Amtrak is funded annually.  Whether it is adequate is another question.  he problem is that it cannot cover its costs out of the fare box and, therefore, it contributes to the national deficit, albeit a small percentage of the total. Nevertheless, as I noted, add up all the small amounts, each of which is driven by passionate constituents, and they come to more than half a trillion dollars.   The debt is a dollar and cents problem. Just take a look at Europe.  And then envision the same thing happening here in a few years.  Solving the problem has political overtones.  But at the end of the day, whether by fiscal policy or monetary policy or a combination thereof, we the people will have to deal with it. And it will hits folks in the pocketbook one way or the other. Since its inception Amtrak has run up accumulated losses of more than $28 billion.  If this has not contributed to the debt, I must have missed something in my accounting, finance, and economics courses, all of which add up to more than 90 hours of study, as well as more than 40 years working for Fortune 250 corporations.   All nations, including this one, have limits.  To this extent the total spend matters.  But for each item, i.e. the amount that should be spent on Amtrak, the total is irrelevant.  The key question is what does society get back for the spend?  What are the priorities or what should they be?  Is Amtrak a priority investment that benefits the public good or are their higher priorities? Should those who favor passenger rail urge the users to pay for it or should they ask the taxpayers to support what the users will not pay for out of their pockets? Venture capitalists and other investors invest when they see an opportunity to earn a reasonable return. If passenger rail presented them with the potential for a reasonable return, the money for it would be there in a heartbeat.  Unfortunately, there is no return in passenger rail, at least not now in this country.  So it is dependent on the taxpayers to prop it up.  I hope the Italian experiment in private passenger rail shows us another way.  Whether it will remains to be seen. According to the U.S. 2010 Census, 14 per cent of Americans live in poverty.  And 21 per cent of the nation's children suffer the same fate. These facts lead me to this question.  Should we spend $3 billion a year (Amtrak's approximate 2011 operating subsidy and capital expenditures) on a national passenger rail system that is used by less than one per cent of intercity travelers or should we spend it on programs designed to help lift the poor, especially the children, out of poverty?  Amtrak's annual subsidy, including the ARRA capital expenditures, would provide a lot of school lunches or training programs for people who need to be retrained for the jobs of the future or better said today's jobs.
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