Amtrak and the CTA

While perusing National Review Online today, I found an interesting article about Amtrak. The basic point is that it's hugely inefficient and wasteful, even selling BEER:

Amtrak may be the only commercial enterprise on earth that actually loses money selling beer. Its food and beverage service requires an $80 million subsidy from Congress each year, and this despite the fact that the food and drink are not cheap. Airlines, facing hard times, have already cut back on free food and beverages. By contrast, starting today, Amtrak is offering some frequent riders a $100 booze credit on certain long trips.

An attempt by Sen. Tom Coburn to require that food service on each route break even or else be cancelled was crushed in a 67-24 vote on Tuesday. Part of the problem is that Amtrak’s workers are ridiculously overpaid. Amtrak’s food-service workers make $54,000 per year plus tips, according to congressional testimony from June 2005 — comparably skilled food-service workers make less than half that amount.

This isn't a surprise to anyone who has ever read about Amtrak. The interesting thing is how the article ended:

Unfortunately, this proposal [to privatize it] makes too much sense, Utt explains. Some congressman, tears in eyes, will tell a story about the man who absolutely depends on Amtrak to get him from Helena to St. Louis for his monthly kidney dialysis.

Well, we could give every such man in America a free automobile — with chauffeur — and still save billions of dollars if we were to stop subsidizing Amtrak. For $54,000 a year plus tips, I might even consider making myself available to drive.

The basic point here correlates with these silly sob stories about some people who will be affected by CTA bus route cuts. These schools (or the city, or whatever) could just run their own buses back and forth rather than beg the state for money. Of course, that wouldn't both increase the CTA's size (and therefore power) and allow Chicago residents to leech off of taxpayers everywhere else in the state, which is what this is really about.