RUSH: This is good. This is Carol Costello, our former stalker at CNN, during a report. This is this morning on the Philadelphia Amtrak crash.
COSTELLO: I keep hearing how ghoulish it is to bring up funding for Amtrak’s infrastructure. Well, I actually ride an Amtrak train every other weekend because my husband lives in Boston. Last week as my Amtrak train was pulling into Providence, Rhode Island, the engine suddenly stopped working. Power on the train went out! It took them 45 minutes to fix it. The heating and cooling systems on board those trains often don’t work properly. Doors are sometimes stuck open. Sometimes the trains break down in the middle of nowhere. Uh, more importantly, all trains are supposed to be equipped with positive train control by the end of the year. Who knows if that will happen! Is it really ghoulish to bring up these infrastructure problems?
RUSH: See, this is the natural progression here of this idiotic narrative that the Democrats and media are pushing. So Carol Costello has this list-of-complaints about Amtrak. Has she ever wondered who it is that runs this train system? She loves and adores government. She never will find anything wrong with government (except when Republicans are running it). This laundry list of complaints about Amtrak, “infrastructure problems,” never-ending list. Does she ever stop to think that it is her own precious, infallible government that’s running this thing that has resulted in all of these problems? Does she ever once consider that?
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RUSH: Here’s Eric in Palm Bay, Florida, great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Rush, it’s an honor and a thrill to talk with you today.
RUSH: I’m glad you got through, sir. Thank you.
CALLER: Me, too. Listen, you were saying something earlier in the program about Washington’s trying to get all of our money running through their control, right?
RUSH: No, what I said was that all money is there. All money goes there. Every dime collected from somebody in this country ends up going to Washington, and then it’s disbursed, spent, stolen, defrauded, grabbed, what have you. But Washington is where it all goes first.
CALLER: Well, that reminded me of something I saw last year. My family and I were on a lavish, carbon-rich vacation. We had to fly through Dulles, but we got delayed there overnight for weather problems. But the next morning we woke up and we’re driving back to the airport, and I’m looking around this place, and it’s immaculate. There’s no sign of economic stress. There’s nothing burned down, there’s nothing boarded up, there’s no dead cars. Everything’s green and painted and beautiful and bright, and I’m like, “This is the federal ghetto.”
RUSH: Well, you probably stayed close to the airport in your hotel overnight?
CALLER: Yeah. It was Fairfax. Isn’t that one of the seven richest counties in the nation?
RUSH: Well, yeah. The whole area there is… All of those ZIP codes combined. Some of the wealthiest ZIP codes is in the area precisely because that’s where the money is. That’s where people go to get the money. The legitimate amount of money that’s in that town every year that’s collected, tax revenue, is around $2 trillion. That’s a lot of money. The government prints more than that. The government borrows more than that.
That town is a magnet for people who want money, and they go out of their way to get it in any which way, shape, manner, or form. The unemployment rate in that area is way below the national average, and the reason that this matters is… Don’t misunderstand. Nobody’s criticizing what is a nice area, a good life. Nobody’s criticizing that. That isn’t the point. The point is that the people who live there really have no idea what it’s like in many other parts of the country.
They end up thinking everybody’s doing well, everything’s okay; that there isn’t any blight anywhere. And if there is, it’s certainly not the fault of the people in Washington. It’s other things. But it isolates people. It walls them off, both physically and attitudinally, and it makes it very difficult for people that actually live there to relate to the lives that the vast majority of Americans are navigating these days.
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RUSH: Here’s Carol Costello, and she’s whining and moaning about the basic state of disarray, the state of decomposition, the state of disrepair that her precious Amtrak trains are in. Such as the heating and cooling systems don’t work, the engines sometimes don’t work properly, doors are stuck open, trains break down in the middle of nowhere. She keeps getting on ’em. She keeps getting on the thing.
Would you get on an airplane that may not fly? Would you get on a train where the engine may stop and the doors may stick open in the dead of winter out in the middle of the nowhere? She gets on ’em. You know why? Liberals love Europe, and Europe equals trains. Trains equal Europe. Trains equal good liberal. Trains also equal saving the climate and all this cockamamie crap.
I wonder if Carol Costello understands how much Amtrak is subsidized? In other words, what do you think she pays for a trip from Boston to Washington to see her husband now and then? What is it? I wouldn’t know because I’ve never been on an Amtrak train. (interruption) A hundred bucks, $150? (interruption) Okay, but that’s a subsidized price, right? If she had to pay what it really costs, if there was a private sector entity running that thing and trying to run it at a profit — and, by the way, if there were, the engines would work and the doors would not stick.
If there were private sector industry running Amtrak, every problem she had would be solved. It would have to be or people wouldn’t pay to get on it. As it is, people are paying much less than what it really costs to ride these things because the government, good liberals, subsidizes everybody. That’s why the cars are in a state of disrepair. There is no incentive. This has been done for all the wrong reasons.
You let some transportation company in the private sector buy this thing and run it, try to make a profit out of it, it’s gonna be spic-and-span. It’s gonna be modernized. Doors and windows won’t stick and all this kind of stuff, but you’ll have to pay for it, too. So you pick your poison. You want to go on a train on a bunch of dilapidated cars you can’t guarantee are gonna get you there on time, the doors and windows may stick open, the engine may stop, but you’re only gonna pay a small fraction of what it would cost otherwise.
Then don’t complain. Or take a plane. You know, there are shuttles that run from Washington to New York and Boston to Washington, but, you see, that’s not cool. That’s global warming. And then you’ll hear the old saw, “By the time I drive to the airport and check in with TSA and get wanded and have to strip, and then have to put my clothes back on, my shoes back on, and refill all of my congestion bottles and stuff, and then stand in line to get a boarding pass, I could drive to Boston quicker than it’s gonna take me to get there on a plane.” That’s crap, by the way, it’s absolute BS, but it’s become a popular thing to say. Flying is global warming and who knows what have you.
So I just had a guy say to me, “Yeah, well, you know, she’s got a point. The other day I had to get from Newark to Philadelphia, 80 bucks.”
I said, “You think 80 bucks Newark to Philadelphia is overpriced?”
“Yeah, you can do it on a greyhound for 20.”
I said, “Really? Why didn’t you?”
“I did. I did.”
“Well, then why didn’t you walk? It’s not that far.”
But the people living in Washington, you tell them 80 bucks from Newark to Philadelphia on a train, they think that’s nothing. That’s not even what they spend on the wine at dinner. They can’t relate to people that 60 bucks or 80 bucks to get from one place to another is too expensive. They can’t relate to it. So here come subsidies and all that, and they think you’re doing everybody a favor with all this. It’s no mystery why this stuff doesn’t work.
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RUSH: We just checked it, folks. First class Amtrak on the Acela train from Boston to New York, the Acela Metroliner, is 390 bucks. Let’s round it up. It’s 400 bucks for first class, which would be what Carol Costello would be taking. Do you think you could fly from Washington to Boston on the shuttle for 400 bucks? See, the train’s supposed to be so much cheaper and economical and helping the government and saving the planet and all that. I just wonder. I don’t know what the shuttle ticket is from Washington to Boston or New York, but it’s about 400 bucks first class on the Acela.