“And Amtrak refuses to open its books to scrutiny as other public corporations have to.”
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The GAO has been in, out, and through Amtrak’s books over the years.
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I object strongly to the present-tense use of “Amtrak REFUSES to open…” [Emphasis added.] The new Amtrak president, David Gunn, has made it one of his major goals to clean up Amtrak’s accounting system once and for all. To that end, he has been quite open to Congress, the GAO, and the public about Amtrak’s financial situation and performance since the day he stepped in. Unfortunately, he’s been in only a very few months, and hasn’t had a chance to make any really big changes before Bush, Mineta, and Company basically pounced and said “fix everything BEFORE we give you any money!”
"Billion Dollar Government Bailout? Has anyone else thought “Let’s get Lee Iacocca!”?
Another excellent question. That’s precisely why David Gunn was hired. His last jobs were heading the transit systems of New York City, Toronto, and Washington DC (not necessarily in that order). He was hired in all those places to reform the place from top to bottom. In effect, he’s considered THE “go to” guy for passenger rail operators on their last legs.
Gunn is considered to be almost too honest – read “blunt” – for his own good, because he consideres the only way an organization with a bad reputation can rebuild its reputation is by speaking the 100% truth, even when that’s painful.
On the other hand, while he’ll clean out dead weight from both management and labor, sparing neither, and cut excessive costs to the bone, he doesn’t believe in balancing the books on the back of the passengers by cutting services.
IMHO, Amtrak under Gunn (no pun intended!) given a year or two for Gunn to act and adequate short-term funding to keep the system running, will separate the people who complain about Amtrak because it is wasteful and those who just use Amtrak’s present inefficiency as a lever to get rid of intercity passenger rail in this country.
[Really. I’m not exaggerating about Gunn. This guy is THAT good. :D]
John Bredlin: Hold on… First you say that the GAO has been ‘all through’ the books, and then you say that Amtrak has a new president who ‘promises to clean up the accounting’. So it sounds like Amtrak’s books WEREN’T open as cleanly as they could be.
For the record, I made the comment about opening the books because I just saw a debate on CNN over the future of Amtrak, and one of Amtrak’s critics was going on about how Amtrak’s accounting was convoluted, hidden, and not available to scrutiny. The defender of Amtrak agreed that it was a ‘problem’, but one that was being dealt with.
The next day Larry Kudlow was talking about Amtrak on a different channel, and made the same point. He was the one recommending that Amtrak be left to go into receivership, because this would completely open the books and make the entire corporation open to scrutiny.
ElvisL1ves: Get bent. You have a problem with the factual content of something I say, REFUTE it. If you can’t or won’t, shut up.
I keep focusing on David Gunn because so many of the borderline posts (I like Amtrak, but…) seem to focus on mismanagement.
Anyhow, don’t take my word for it. Here’s a USA Today article on Gunn:
http://www.usatoday.com/money/general/2002/06/28/amtrak-gunn.htm
He even gets compliments about how he ran the New York City system from Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign! 
Seriously, anyone who lives or has lived in NYC knows how the Straphangers rarely have anything positive to say about the NYCTA, so any praise from Russianoff is solid praise indeed.
"Hold on… First you say that the GAO has been ‘all through’ the books, and then you say that Amtrak has a new president who ‘promises to clean up the accounting’. So it sounds like Amtrak’s books WEREN’T open as cleanly as they could be. "
You’re right, that requires some clarification.
On one hand, Amtrak’s books have not been literally “closed”, that is, kept private and unavailable for scrutiny. The GAO and others HAVE been through the books, Amtrak issues an annual financial report, budget, etcetera. like any other public or private corporation.
On the other hand, due to the accounting rules applied, it has not always been clear which trains brought in which revenue and incurred which expenses. AFAIK, there’s never been a doubt as to how much Amtrak made or spent altogher, the controversy has been over the apportionment of the revenue and expenses to individual trains. To give an example, how do you assign the various costs of running Penn Station to the various routes, corridor, long-distance, and commuter railway tenants?
In short, Amtrak books to date have been “convoluted” but not “hidden” or “not available to scrutiny”.
Is this a fairly recent change? Perhaps of Gunn’s doing? Because I seem to recall that when Amtrak announced its 4 billion debt, it caught quite a few analysts by surprise.
To be fair to Amtrak, the reason they have the debt is because I believe they were honestly trying to operate the company without subsidies. It just didn’t work.
Sam, John has already done a very effective job of refuting you. Hint: When one asserts a fact, as you did about Amtrak’s books, it helps a whole lot for it to be a fact. When asked, the burden is on you to support it. Once again, you were proven to have simply yanked something out of your ass, or perhaps off Fox, and you’re pouting over once again having it shown in public.
If you want to have your posts taken seriously, base them on facts, m’kay? As you have been told before, a lot of people take a lot of time cleaning up after you here. When you’re proven wrong, you’re wrong. The honest, adult response is to accept it and to be more careful about one’s own sources next time.
Now, how do you feel about Canadian government funding of Via Rail? For once, have you got any opinions, or knowledge, or even interest in, the situation in your own damn country that could help enlighten us all here?
Elvis, you might want to read that again. He didn’t ‘refute’ what I said - he disagreed with the word ‘hidden’, but agreed that the accounting could be convoluted and hard to follow.
And I did offer one of my sources for that - Larry Kudlow. He may be wrong or right, and I may in fact be wrong in this case. That’s fine. I’m not perfect.
What is out of line for you to come in here smearing me and contributing nothing else to the debate. And every time you do this, you always claim that I NEVER have the facts right, despite the fact that the last couple of times you’ve done that I’ve had to slap you down with a mountain of cites that validated what I was saying - and which you never responded to. Then you just repeat the charge in the next thread.
Time for you to get a life. There’s more to the Straight Dope board than Sam Stone, you know. You don’t need to follow me around taking shots at me whenever you can. I suggest you either engage in the debate and refute what I have to say, or go play in someone else’s sandbox.
And you’ve really got to get off of this thing about how I, as a Canadian, somehow don’t have a right to participate in this forum, or that there’s something wrong with me not talking about Canadian issues more. I tore you a big one for that in the military thread a while ago, remember?
You may notice that I participate in most Canadian threads, but the fact is, the majority of people here are American, and they don’t want to hear about VIA rail, it’s 170 million dollar annual subsidy, political cronyism that causes it to get so little money one year that the rolling stock is out of date and dangerous, and then in the next year gets a feasibility study for a 12 billion bullet train. And Chretien’s best buddy runs it now, and is getting all kinds of extra money. Bah.