Give it away!

Sean Davis writes in The Federalist,

Last night in Philadelphia, an Amtrak regional train traveling from Washington, D.C. to New York derailed, leaving at least six dead and more than 100 injured.

...I was shocked, in spite of my near-total cynicism, by the instant partisan political reaction to the crash. While first responders were still trying to get crash victims off the smoking trains, partisans took to Twitter to explain why all this had happened: those awful Republicans were starving Amtrak of cash.

...According to its unaudited financial statements, Amtrak lost over a billion dollars in 2014, the last year for which annual revenue and expense data are available.

Since its creation, Amtrak has racked up over $31 billion in accumulated losses. And every penny of those losses has been covered by federal taxpayers.

...the key to fixing Amtrak is to just give it away. Hand over the entire enterprise to whichever rail company wants it.

The status quo costs taxpayers at least a billion dollars each year. Given that the bulk of its rail traffic occurs in the well-heeled Northeast corridor, the company primarily serves as a means of transferring wealth from middle America to D.C., New York, and Boston. In its current form, Amtrak is less a for-profit passenger rail corporation and more a union jobs program (its ridiculous labor contracts are a major reason why the company is perpetually swimming in red ink).

If you want to fix Amtrak, don’t mess with its budget or saddle it with top-down, government-mandated and government-managed reforms. Don’t sell it off. Just give it away. Give it to an organization that actually knows what it’s doing. Give it to a rail company that knows how to hire and manage staff and maintain its capital investments, all without dumping a billion-dollar invoice on American taxpayers every year.

If you want to save Amtrak, the solution is simple: just give it away.

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