This morning as I write this, we are still discussing the Amtrak derailment last week that killed a number of passengers and injured 200. Naturally, the discussion immediately became political, since we are in a presidential campaign season (identifiable by our being in a month that has letters of the alphabet in it).
The Democrat left seized on the accident -- caused not by issues with the railway infrastructure but by an engineer driving the train at twice the posted speed -- to complain about the crumbling infrastructure (that didn't cause the accident) and the decaying bridges (which didn't cause the accident). "More money", they beg, at least before it was discovered that projectiles were directed at the engineer's window, which money probably would not help.
Well, here's the thing. Amtrak gets about half a billion a year from the American taxpayer for its $1.4 billion budget, even though few of us ride the rails in a given year. Amtrak would need no money from the American taxpayer, except it is unprofitable as an enterprise. There's probably a rational argument for saying that if Amtrak can't make money as a Federal dolee, it should either fold up its tracks and stop operating or privatize and let people who run railroads for a living try to make money.
But let's stipulate that there is some kind of compelling national interest in passenger railways, to the point that it is worth a half billion in taxpayers' money to make up the difference. And we'll further stipulate that there is some kind of compelling national interest in the Federal government actually running Amtrak (as opposed to just regulating it). I disagree, but we'll stipulate it anyway.
What is the single most avoidable reason that Amtrak is operating at a gargantuan loss each year? Is it spending too much on repairs? No. Are the fares not at the optimal point that they would balance ridership with revenues? No -- well, I can only guess not; since the Democrats don't understand supply, demand and the Laffer curve, it probably hasn't been looked at.
No; Amtrak loses a lot of money because pretty much only in the Northeast corridor does Amtrak make money. While the Washington-to-New York route on which the engineer decided to play A.J. Foyt profited over $280 million last year, the rest of the rail routes combined lost over $600 million in taxpayer-subsidized dollars.
We who are unencumbered by politics would look at that and ask why there are routes out there that are still being run, even if unprofitable. And we don't have to look up the answer; it's in the previous sentence -- politics.
Yes, there are routes that Amtrak runs because Senator X or Representative Y needed to tell their voters that they had done something tangible for their state, and "tangible" can be attached to having an Amtrak route go through their otherwise unvisitable cities.
But how, pray tell, can one Senator's request be so powerful that 99 others would go along with wasting taxpayer dollars so he or she can get reelected innumerable times? It's called "seniority", and the cure for seniority and its ills is called "term limits."
Way back in October I wrote a piece here about the fact that the real evil in not having term limits is in the inevitable abuse of seniority by those able to be repeatedly reelected. It is evil because it results in unequal representation (between safe left or right-leaning states and toss-up ones); it is pernicious because it is self-exacerbating -- the longer that congressman are in office, the better chairmanships they get, the more pork they can bring home, and the more likely their reelection.
It has gotten to where every time that Congress does something that disproportionately benefits the residents of one state at the expense of the taxpayers elsewhere, you can jolly well look and find that the principal architect of the deceit is either a sitting congressman, who has sat way too long and accumulated way too much power, or one who made a quid pro quo deal with one in another state who has.
Now, we hear the whining of Democrat congressmen and presidential candidates inevitably complaining that, if only we had spend a couple more billion (borrowed from China, as the taxpayers' money is used up), that accident wouldn't have happened.
Here's a thought. How about we pass a term-limit amendment to the Constitution -- two terms for Senators, four for House members -- that will eliminate the seniority system. We'll stop doing things like building Amtrak lines to East Uppersquash that lose money from day one. We can actually close unprofitable Amtrak lines and concentrate on lines that get used profitably, not because they're where a seven-term Senator is in office, but because they're where actual people live and use trains.
There you go -- a tangible benefit of term limits. Pretty sure there will be more.
Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."
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