The present administration continues to put Biden out there. He used to be able to get through reading or reciting a short statement. Now, he can’t even get through 30 seconds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1fT4DwZ7x0
President Joe Biden gave a speech at Amtrak’s 50th anniversary event on April 30, 2021. Another speaker at the event was Bill Flynn, CEO of Amtrak:
Bill Flynn: “The American Jobs Plan, which includes $80 billion for rail, is just what the country needs as we built for the future. America needs a rail network that offers frequent, reliable, sustainable, and equitable train service. Amtrak has the vision and the expertise to deliver it. Now, we need Congress to provide the funding for the next 50 years. Our vision includes expanding rail service to connect to up to 160 new communities throughout the United States by building new and improved corridors in over 25 states.
But, we’re not stopping there. We’re investing in our fleet. Last week, we announced the procurement of 83 intercity train sets, which will operate on the Northeast Corridor and various state-supported and long distance routes. We will soon debut the new high-speed of Acela train sets, setting the stage for the next generation of train travel in America and on our Northeast Corridor.
We’re investing in our stations.
We’re investing in our infrastructure.
All of these projects are investments in our future, but they’re also investments in our planet. Amtrak provides a more sustainable mode of travel and demand for rail travel will continue to grow. In fact, traveling on Amtrak emits up to 83% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than by driving and up to 73% fewer GHGs than by flying.”
That’s a rosy and misleading assessment. The CATO Institute begs to differ.
Amtrak argues that it “lowers carbon emissions” and “addresses the climate crisis.” But buses emit far less greenhouse gases per passenger mile than Amtrak’s Diesel‐powered trains, and the trains do only slightly better than airliners. In 2019, Amtrak’s Diesels used 9 trillion BTUs carrying a little less than 4 billion passenger miles. Using standard factors, that works out to about 167 grams of carbon dioxide per passenger‐mile. Buses emit only about 60 grams per passenger mile. The airlines emit about 174 grams per passenger‐mile, but before the pandemic they were improving faster than Amtrak. I suspect that air travel will recover more than train travel so that, after the pandemic is but a distant nightmare, flying will be greener than Amtrak.
In its eagerness to expand its empire, Amtrak is hoping that everyone forgets that its ridership is down by 74 percent.
(Amtrak, however, will be politically obligated to maintain service even with a loss of riders. As a result, subsidies to Amtrak will rise from 50 percent of its costs to 75 percent.)
From Business Insider:
- “Amtrak has been operating since 1971, but it has yet to become profitable.
- With high ticket costs, Amtrak has become a less viable mode of transportation in the United States. It’s often more expensive to take a train than it is to fly.
- The US government attempted to make Amtrak financially self-sufficient with the Acela Express, but Amtrak still has a large sum of debt from years of underfunding. (Ed. Underfunding? How about corruption and mismanagement?)
- To this day, trains still have a low profit margin and rely heavily on subsidies to operate.
Why are inefficient, wasteful government programs perpetuated? From Robert Samuelson, Washington Post:
Amtrak is still chugging along, and I am still railing against it because it so aptly symbolizes a much wider problem: our inability to end — or modify — old programs that have outlived their usefulness, if they ever were useful. This is a root cause of our budget problems and a larger failure to reassess the role of government.
Government shouldn’t be an instrument for anything that, at some point, seems worth doing. But that is why we have Amtrak and countless other programs. They serve no genuine national need. Worse, we seem incable of doing anything about this. In politics, inertia reigns. What exists tends to survive.
If Congress gives Amtrak Biden’s newly proposed $80 billion, most of that would go to replacing or rehabilitating infrastructure in the Northeast Corridor. The CATO institute states that “Amtrak really wants to get the states to fund many of the light blue (local) lines on the map.”
Biden is totally lost in the opening clip. He had a few key words in mind, but he could not formulate a thought, and thus, he could not put together a sentence.
Biden is as outdated and inefficient as Amtrak is. Therefore, it is fitting that one of his nicknames is Amtrak Joe.
For more information on Amtrak’s history and ongoing deficits, see:
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/amtrak-why-so-expensive-america-train-system-2019-3