Your argument about Amtrak employees paying income taxes doesn't go very far.
Amtrak's annual budget (at least, as of a few years ago) is about $3 billion. If we were to assume that every last penny of that $3 billion were payroll costs (and, obviously, it isn't), and assume that every Amtrak employee paid 25% of that in taxes (in reality, it's likely less), the total federal income taxes paid would be $750 million.
The federal government's subsidy to Amtrak exceeds that by several hundred million dollars per year.
As far as the argument about Amtrak being green and reducing the wear on highways, it's technically true, but 1) most politicians don't care, and 2) the impact on highways (outside of a few short-distance corridors) is negligible. It probably wouldn't impact the actual lifespan of any of the highways. Don't get me wrong, there are many reasons that Amtrak should be subsidized and continue to exist, including providing people alternatives, and I do believe that highway budgets should be reduced, and highways through large cities should actually get smaller or be removed completely, but long-distance sleeping car trains in and of themselves aren't going to take a significant number of people off the highways.
Getting back to the sleeper and dining sevice; if Amtak did not offer it you can say goodbye to most of the long distance runs. Do you believe that many people would take the EB or CZ and ride for three days sitting up in a chair eating crackers?
Straw man argument. This topic isn't about eliminating sleeping car or food service, and nobody is proposing such.
As for cost of sleeper service, its already high, far higher than air travel. There is only a limit to how much Amtrak can charge before people say no thanks, and I believe they are already at that limit.
Again, they are at
your limit. But given how quickly inventory is flying off the "shelves" so to speak, especially during peak time, and that most sleepers are full, somebody must still think they're a good deal.
So I must conclude congress gave Amtrak a bigger mission than just getting passengers from A to B in coach.
I think it's a fallacy to believe that congress has given Amtrak any mission at all. If they had, then there wouldn't be these large debates every year or two about whether or not we need Amtrak, whether or not Amtrak is doing its job or if they're just a waste of money, whether or not we should have long-distance trains, etc.
The closest to a "mission" Amtrak has been given by congress is to run trains (and, recently, the only real mission congress has been giving Amtrak has been to study the possibility of running trains). Amtrak has had to pretty much figure the rest out by itself.
Hopefully they will bring the prices down to reasonable. Right now they are releasing them at high bucket.
