boo hoo. i'm rich and have to pay thirty seven percent in taxes.

Great Debates
41

“Before you rip me on suggesting you can tell income by appearance, I suggest you go to the local Amtrak or Greyhound station, and see if you can distinguish the clientele from the frequent fliers.”

[I am about to commit aggravated hijacking in the first degree. Sorry.]

No, Dinsdale, YOU should go to the Amtrak station to take a look. I suspect that you wouldn’t be able to distinguish the crowd at the station from the usual airport crowd. Amtrak charges about the same as the airlines, if not more in some cases. With a few exceptions, the people riding the trains aren’t doing so because it’s cheaper than flying. Don’t lump Amtrak and the “running dog” together; except that they both travel along the ground on wheels, they bear no resemblance to each other at all.

In the Northeast and the other corridor routes, where cities are about two to four hours apart by rail, the train is actually faster than flying when you count getting to and from the airport. These routes have several trains a day, and the trains are full of business people, fixing their ties and talking on their cellphones (which they can’t do on a plane except on the $3/minute ripoff airphones).

On the longer routes, the ridership is mainly people on vacation with the spare time to travel by train and avoid the cramped conditions of airliners nowadays. With a few people able to afford plane tickets but afraid of flying mixed in. Amtrak serves real food on plates at tables. You can get up and walk around, since the aisles are more than two feet wide. Sleeper passengers get a real bed and a shower (top that, airlines!), and even coach seats have ass and leg room that comes only in first class on airplanes. The long-distance trains tend to run only once a day each direction, but they are well-traveled, with some routes booked up for weeks in advance.

The only place where Amtrak falls short is being late on the long-distance routes. But the airlines don’t have spotless on-time records either (to make the understatement of the century) and a person who decides to take a train for 20 hours in the first place is rarely concerned if the train comes in 2 hours late.

42

Kimstu wrote:

I was going to debunk point for point some of what you wrote but that doesn’t seem fruitful. I will summarize by saying that when comparing ‘wealthy executive’ to ‘poor urban woman’ the bottom line is ‘poor urban woman’ is a net drain on the country’s resources while ‘wealthy executive’ is a net provider of wealth to the country. In short, ‘wealthy executive’ will consume less then he/she pays into the system even if he/she ultimately consumes more than ‘poor urban woman’ (which I think is debatable). Some have pointed out, rightly, that this is as it should be. The ‘haves’ should pickup the slack for the ‘have nots’. The question is how far into ‘wealthy executive’s’ pocketbook should this extend?

Also, our focus of discussion in this thread has been on overall taxes…mainly federal and perhaps state taxes. While I don’t want to expand much beyond that it is important to note the many other taxes everyone can be faced with. Poor urban woman doesn’t have a car so therefore roads are useless to her (she has no car)? Well, I pay a licensing fee to the state for my car. I also pay a city tax for my car. Gasoline is also taxed separately (and in Chicago where there is a City, State and County tax making the tax portion of the gas substantial part of the total cost). In addition, the roads (expressways) around Chicago are almost entirely toll roads. Drive on them and you effectively pay a usage tax. Poor urban woman, with no car, is faced with none of these taxes and that’s fine. However, it is disingenuous to say that she is also saddled with paying for something she doesn’t use as she avoids many of the charges specifically relating to owning a car. The percentage of her taxes that pay for roads (via federal funds…however much that may be) can constitute her fair dues since she does gain benefit without owning a car. Police and firemen can get to her house quicker in an emergency, a supermarket can be located a block away instead of three miles away because roads exist to deliver goods, the mass transit bus can stop nearby, etc…

Dinsdale wrote:

In the end it matters little to our discussion whether or not the FAA subsidizes airlines. If they do then this is a subsidy for the poor. Even if air travel is still out of the reach of many poor a subsidy lowers the bar which poor people must overcome to hop on a plane. Clearly the rich can already afford it so while they might be happy for the few extra bucks they save it’s probably not terribly meaningful to them. They’d fly anyway.

Pretty much any tax that is not progressive (i.e. you pay more because you can afford it) tends to be regressive (it hurts more the poorer you are). A $1 per gallon tax may not hurt me too much but it can sting the hell out of someone who lives near the poverty line. If they need their car to work you can end up pushing people out of jobs again disproportionately hurting the poor.

43

So John, what are the “other corridor routes” that enjoy train service equivalent to the NE? And where is the investment into high speed trains going?

For several years, I passed through an Amtrak station 2X/day, and still use it regularly tho not daily. Sorry, bro, I see a difference. Don’t see too many businessmen, or very wealthy-appearing folk taking the train. For one thing, the wealthy and business people don’t wish to afford the potential time wasted for a late train. Yes, my flight might be delayed, but I have the option of seeing if I can switch to another airline, or another flight leaving in an hour or two. Don’t have that option with the train.

Perhaps what I should have emphasized is that I wish there were more reliable frequent high speed train travel available between Chicago and say Detroit, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Minneapolis for starters. And I think one reason trains are hurting is because it is artificially cheap for airlines to provide short run service in certain markets.

I must admit Chicago does enjoy phenomenal commuter service.

I’m a big train fan. If I ever have to board the dog again, tho, please shoot me.

44

Jeff42: I will summarize by saying that when comparing ‘wealthy executive’ to ‘poor urban woman’ the bottom line is ‘poor urban woman’ is a net drain on the country’s resources while ‘wealthy executive’ is a net provider of wealth to the country.

Well, of course: nobody was trying to argue that that’s not so (substituting “federal financial resources” for “country”, just to be precise). It would be ridiculous to argue otherwise, in fact, because if you didn’t have some net providers of wealth you wouldn’t have any money to run a government with.

What I believed you were claiming was that more of the government’s money (irrespective of who provides it) ultimately gets spent on the poor than on the middle-class and wealthy. I won’t reiterate the reasons I gave for disagreeing with that, but now that you see what point I was making maybe they will make more sense. This has nothing to do with who gets a bigger “return on investment,” i.e., what individual gets the most direct financial benefits in return for the least direct financial payments. I agree with many of the other posters that that’s not the best way to look at a government’s utility. We shouldn’t be saying, “what should the government do for me and how much should that cost me?”, but “what should the government do as a whole, how much can we afford to spend on that, and what’s the best way of paying for it?”

And I think everyone’s missed the point a little bit about the FAA; it represents money spent on civil aviation, i.e., ultimately directed to those who can afford plane tickets, not so much because it subsidizes private airlines as because it supports and regulates aviation overall, e.g., keeps planes from crashing into each other. Most of us air travelers, who tend to dislike plane crashes, consider that money well spent, but obviously it is a less important issue to those who can’t afford to fly anyway.

45

Well, no other Amtrak corridor has AS good service as the Northeast. :slight_smile: However, there are some decent corridors outside the Northeast:

Pacific Surfliners between LA and San Diego: 11 trains (round trips per day).
Capitols between San Jose, Oakland, and Sacramento: 7 trains.
Hiawathas between Chicago and Milwaukee: 6 trains.
San Joaquins between Sacramento or Oakland and Bakersfield: 5 trains.
Cascades between Seattle and Portland: 4 trains.

I admit that outside the corridors, you aren’t going to see more than a handful of business travelers. Of course, once you get to trips more than four or five hours by train, the whole bottleneck of driving to and from the airport becomes irrelevant and flying is definitely faster. And I agree that unless you have several departures a day, the convenience and margin for error for business travelers disappears.

“Perhaps what I should have emphasized is that I wish there were more reliable frequent high speed train travel available between Chicago and say Detroit, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Minneapolis for starters. And I think one reason trains are hurting is because it is artificially cheap for airlines to provide short run service in certain markets.”

I agree 1000% percent with all of that. :slight_smile:

I apologize if I was a bit strident in my earlier posting. I was responding to what appeared to be a characterization that Amtrak’s ridership was predominantly from the lower class and lower middle class. I ride a commuter train out of Chicago Union Station every day* and the Amtrak passengers don’t look any sloppier or worse dressed than the airline passengers who aren’t traveling on business. Shorts or jeans and t-shirts are just as common among the people riding the commuter trains in from the suburbs for a day in town (that is, not to work),** the Amtrak passengers not coming onto or off the Hiawatha, and the typical crowd on a flight to Florida from O’Hare.

*Yes, Chicago does have phenomenal commuter service. :slight_smile:

** How do you tell the suburban day-tripper from the Amtrak passenger, other than what train they’re waiting for or coming off of? The Amtrak passengers have carry-on luggage, while the suburbanites arrive downtown empty-handed and leave it laden down with shopping bags. American Girl Place seems inordinately popular. :slight_smile: