Amtrak. Budget. Status quo. If you're rushed for time this morning you can stop reading now. If you're interested in that first word, you already know what the second word's about, and whenever you're talking about Amtrak and the budget, the upshot always is status quo.
Amtrak's in the news again, as it is every year this time. As (nearly) always, the president's latest budget proposal looks to cut funding for Amtrak, the national passenger rail business that serves, among other places, portions of Montana.
Doing so would make a lot of sense. The reason Amtrak needs subsidies is that relatively few people ride the train, except for commuters along the East Coast. Airlines, cars and buses are the way most people move around the country. The cross-country passenger railroad industry reached the end of the line decades ago, and the $30 billion taxpayers have spent on Amtrak since then has kept an essentially bankrupt service running, but hasn't given it a future. Amtrak's total ridership last year was
25 million passengers, a record, compared to more than 460 million airline boardings.
But let's not dwell on that this morning. Amtrak's an uneconomic venture, a rat hole for tax dollars, but it's also proved to be the Little Engine that Couldn't. Couldn't be cut, that is. Year after year, presidents and fiscal conservatives in Congress try to derail Amtrak subsidies, and year after year, Congress comes up with enough money to keep the system sputtering along for another year.
In the scheme of things, Amtrak subsidies amount to chump change. It takes the entire income tax payments of only a few million people to keep Amtrak running. Easy come, easy go, if you know what we mean. The real problem is this: If Congress and the president can't manage to cut subsidies for Amtrak, then there's little hope that they'll ever meaningfully reduce expenditures for much of anything else.
So, big surprise: President Bush's budget for the coming year proposes to spend nearly $2.57 trillion - a whopping 39 percent more than the amount spent in fiscal year 2000 under the last budget submitted by President Clinton! The White House proposes to offset some of that spending with budget cuts, but what always happens is the increases sale through Congress while the cuts rarely do. Proposals to cut things like Amtrak make politicians sound like fiscal conservatives, but it's what they do, not say, that matters.
Amtrak may not be a very good system of transportation. But it's a fitting metaphor for the way federal government grows.
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