Shutting down passenger rail doesn't mean shutting down railroads. I'm fine with the government having a plan in place to facilitate transportation in a time of emergency. I'm NOT fine with the government running an enterprise that hemorrhages money.

You may have also missed one of my criteria: namely, the constitutionality of Amtrak or any agency that I write about. The federal government has the authority to run the mail system, but that's about the only business venture they were authorized to engage in. If you think that a federally-run passenger rail system is vital to our national security or to interstate commerce, get the Constitution changed. At least then we will have the discussion out in the open, rather than our current process of having Congress pass new bureaucracies in fly-by-night, 2,000-page bills.

Wow, did Amtrak start hiring an internet PR team to manage their public image on articles like this? I had no idea.

Yes, most forms of transportations are subsidized, but not at the national level. Roads are paid for by state budgets, with the exception of interstate highways. Also, while "subsidized," roads are DIRECTLY paid for by an excise tax on gasoline. There are those, like my parents, who have never taken an Amtrak train in their lives, and have been forced to bear the burden of paying for it.

As for Clark's comment, that the NYC-to-DC route on Amtrak makes money - good! Why not privatize it? I'll be willing to bet that it makes more money as a private entity than it does under the government's management. And yes, I understand that there are bigger fish to fry in the budget.

The problem I've found with many big-government types is that they decry conservatives for not having any specifics on where to cut, and for simply being the "Party of NO." Then, when a conservative begins to list details, they are up in arms about some indirect affect that the cut may or may not have. It can't be both things.

Guest -

Sure, but the point of this series is to examine where we can cut and how quickly we can do it. It's pretty easy to suspend Amtrak quickly. It's VERY hard to privatize Social Security quickly, or to end social welfare quickly. Many have become dependent on these huge social programs over many years. We owe it to those who have paid into these programs to make sure that they are there for those who need them in the short-term.

While I'll be the first to demand reform, that is beyond the scope of this series.

Guest -

The layouts for the Federal Highway Administration totaled $41.8 billion in 2010. http://www.dot.gov/budget/2010/bib2010.htm#fhwa
However, federal revenue on gasoline taxes have been just about equivalent to highway expenditures in each year - the federal government collected $37.9 billion in 2007, and that number has likely increased along with most of the other numbers in the budget due to inflation. http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayaf...

Ultimately, I think that highways are something that can also be handled by state/local governments or by private companies - although I don't address that here, since my format is one agency per article.

Thanks Andy - good article by you as well, and it does touch on a lot of the same points. At CPAC, a lot of the establishment-type DC Republicans scoffed at Ron Paul's foreign policy. They may never come around, but I think that the Tea Party movement represents a step in the right direction, and some of the Tea Partiers are willing to subject themselves to reason and "step outside the box" in order to limit an obviously out-of-control government, especially when the Constitutional facts are presented to them. Our job is to get those facts in front of those who will listen.