tl;Dr fuck off and eat shit, idiot
Correct me if I’m wrong, but Amtrak is private, though. It’s publicly subsidized, but it’s not a government agency AFAIK. Same for the post office. Part of the problem with Amtrak, though, is that the state of passenger rail in the US is still down in the septic tank, largely due to almost 100 years of government subsidized car-centric development and heavily subsidized air transit development. You’d have a very hard time attracting private investors interested in a conventional passenger rail mass transit scheme, I think.
Also, everybody benefits, even this fucking douche, when public transit is high quality and affordable. Even if a private company did offer high quality, affordable mass transit, the insatiable drive for ever increasing profits will eventually cause them to enshittify one or both and put us right back here. This is really just another attempt to transfer public wealth into private portfolios, though it’s a little more of a joke compared to privatization efforts in Europe because we basically haven’t been investing at all in public transit for the last fifty years
It’s quasi-public, which is weird. It is subsidized, but just barely (they have like 95% farebox recovery), so i don’t think it’s even responsible to call it subsidized like road and air travel.
I bet if there was enforcement of train priority laws, they could even be a revenue generator. Philosophically, I dont think they should be, though.
Edit: lmao, at those rates, Amtrak is less publicly subsidized than a lot of fortune 500s
I’d be cool with Amtrak turning profit as long as the revenue was always re-invested into better train sets, better routes, more frequent service, cheaper tickets, employee pay and benefits, etc etc, and never just routed to rich fucking assholes who already have more than they know what to do with.
If they are re-investing revenue, it’s not profit. I would want them to be able to expand, pay employees better, etc. What I wouldn’t want is for them to make money and just pay dividends to shareholders.
They really can’t. They inherited hundred year old falling apart infrastructure that is one of the things keeping them from providing good service. There’s no way to make enough profit to rebuild all that infrastructure enough to become profitable on most routes in the first place. They are literally slower in places than they were almost 100 years ago
USPS is not publicly subsidized. All of their operating costs come from the services they sell.
I suggest we deport this Nazi immigrant.
To Atlantis.
I don’t think any other country wants him either, except maybe Russia.
However, he IS a big space enthusiast. Maybe there should be not one, but two Teslas floating in space?
He’ll find those already government run in Russia. Perhaps he should consider relocating to that shithole and leave the United States the fuck alone.
At this point. How could anyone care or take seriously anything Musk or Trump spits. It’s all lies and bullshit.
Privatising literally everything has been their end-goal with ALL of this the entire time. They plaster it with conservative talking points but this entire administration is an effort by corporate forces to dismantle public services, rights and benefits, so that if you so much want to drive to the store you will have to pay a subscription to use the privately maintained roads, so you have a credit-card reader by your faucet and toilet, so that they can tax you on rainwater you’re required to have to collect rain from your gutters. (This is real in other countries.)
The efforts towards killing public services goes way, way back and if you look at every conservative/republican legislation, it all hinges around how “bad” public services are. Public schools teaching evolution, public television for simply existing, and they’ve been massively successful and killing the regulations and oversight on things like media fairness, public health proposals, safety nets and social services, and yes they really, really want to kill our medicare and medicaid, so they can replace them with more bullshit commercial services. They won’t be happy until we stop getting paychecks we can choose how to use and we all just hand our pay right over to a number of subscription services for things they can take away if you miss a payment.
They want us poor, they want us stupid, they want an army of slaves and if they can’t get it via racism and dehumanizing some identifiable group or population, they will just settle for full on serfdom and monarchy. Now get out there and work your lord’s fields!
I mean you have to take their words seriously because they tell you what they’re going to do. Or at the very least what they want to do.
Lies and bullshit, but with a 50% chance of happening
They want to eliminate or control the Postal Service so that they can eliminate mail-in voting. Their added bonus is padding the pockets of fellow millionaires and billionaires.
rip rural service
Definitely, I live in a very rural area of the country I think it might be one of the most rural places in the lower 48 states. And we heavily depend on the postal service to get things that we simply don’t have here. This will totally cripple my town and 99% of the people here will blame it on woke.
Step 1: Privatize and sell it for peanuts to fellow billionaires Step 2: Watch it crumble Step 3: Buy it back for a fortune from the very same people you sold it
E:English
I’m not sure they’ve thought past step 1 honestly.
They probably really think they can run it better.
I don’t think a national railroad company can really become profitable, that’s why I suspect this is done in bad faith
There’s no way national rail can be a profitable service, and certainly not without huge investments in infrastructure. It’s only the northeast corridor that’s profitable, but quite a few other places can be but only after huge infrastructure investments. Those investments are coming from a wholly private company.
Technically Amtrak already is a private company, but owned by the Department of Transportation. Those owners need to pony up for rail infrastructure the same way they’ve always ponies up for highways infrastructure.
As long as they pay out the full pension to all the employee’s. After every postal employee’s pension is fully funded.
Lol, you know they wouldn’t
Of course not. Its been the dream of these scumbags for decades to get their hooks in to all that pension money and screw over the postal workers. They forget the term going postal exist for a reason.
In my country since the government privatized a part of postal service, the quality of service heavily declined to the point that now is almost guaranteed that they will “lose” your letter if you send it in a place that will cost too much to deliver
this is almost what has been happening in my country.
Same.
This is exactly the shit that will give permanent erections to the cons.
And people should not call this shit “Trumpism” - this is who the Republicans are and what the Republican project has always been. They HATE the idea of a functioning society for all. Next up, we’re going to hear how education should be handed over to the Devos family. You know, for “choice”.
Sounds like “somebody” is about to launch Xmail and AmtraX, coincidentally of course
AmTrak is a hill I am willing to die for on.
No.
Not everything should be privatized so some asshole oligarch can have another toy.
Everything that has been privatized, has ended up costing us more for shittier service. This will not be different.
I dare say everything should be nationalized as a civil service.
Exactly, we have UPS, FedEx, DHL and bunch of others.
Leave USPS the fuck alone.
They’re all shit too. Fat lot of good privatization would do. USPS was Cool and Good until DeJoy was dropped in to throw wrenches into the cogs.
UPS is actually fairly reliable. FedEx is hit and miss depending on the driver coverage area you’re in, DHL and others just don’t even exist.
USPS has always been great, but primarily for handling “last mile” where a lot of customers need reliable delivery of low monetary value packages like letters that UPS isn’t set to handle, but carry some of the most important lifelines of information to rural and poor Americans.
UPS has always been hit or miss at best in my experience, but of the three, I’ll concede that it’s the least garbage. The other two have delivered packages to the wrong house—not as in like, “next door” wrong house, but as in “some house miles away” wrong house—or they sometimes just flat out don’t deliver a package and return it to the sender. If they do deliver a package, it’s rarely on time.
As for USPS, nowadays, my wife has tracked packages to see that they are brought to our local mail sorting facility, but then for some bizarre, inexplicable reason, they’re sent off elsewhere, even to another state, before being delivered here days later than the estimated delivery date. I have no idea what the hell is happening, but it’s insane and insanely stupid. And I know who is to blame, at least with this service anyway.
DeJoy got rid of around 1/3 of the mail sorting machines, so now they have to fake it or something. They cannot keep up with the volume of mail, is my guess.
that’s their goal, crush the public service competition
This. Alternatives mean that they can hold monopoly and jackup prices on a whim.
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I’d bet he wants to take over Amtrak so he can replace it with that stupid Las Vegas car tunnel.
Or replace it with nothing, because “railways and mass transit are obsolete” (translation: “they’re hurting my car sales”).
Privatize deez nutz, bitch
The post office would take an act of congress.
Both would, actually. They are independent quasi governmental corpirations.
And a constitutional amendment.
It wouldn’t need a constitutional amendment. The constitution says they can, not they must, run a postal service
Whole lotta shit happening right now that should take an act of congress. Seems to make no difference.
Nah, not anymore, just an XO and the little fascists will make it happen.
