I think we are jealous. The defense department gets all the back up equipment it needs; Amtrak doesn't
I'd say envious rather than jealous, but yes. The DoD is getting gigantic, wasteful slush funds at this point, and can't even account for how it's using them. I think whether you're "right wing" or "left wing" you should be able to support redirecting some of this money, which is currently being wasted on gross incompetence, towards the domestic program of your choice, whether it's Amtrak or anything else. (How about block grants to state governments? That used to be a right wing thing, or have they abandoned that now?)
As gmushial explained, the military is a huge and growing part of government operations, and is larger in money terms than everything else the federal government operates (roads, farm supports, food safety, etc.), with the exception of Medicare and Social Security. It's a larger bureaucracy than *anything* else in the US government. It is also the single largest pot of government money which is *prone to graft*, because there's lots of contracts to award and stuff like that.
Social Security is giant in "cash flowing through" terms, of course, but that's because it's basically a large pension program, with a completely separate incoming money stream from payroll tax. There's no room for graft because of the automatic, rule-based nature of the program, no contracts to award. And it has *extremely* low overhead for a pension program.
Medicare has somewhat larger overhead, and is also a large operation, but it's basically a health insurance company, with its own premiums and its own payroll tax. And it has lower overhead than any private insurance company. It's very clean for the same reason as Social Security -- little bureaucracy, little discretion. There is some fraud: for instance, Florida governor Rick Scott's company Columbia/HCA famously defrauded Medicare (he got caught and the company paid $1.7 billion in fines).
But the military... it's by far the largest *bureaucracy* in the government, it's the biggest user of *outside contracts* (opportunity for fraud), it can't even pass an audit. Also, it routinely loses wars, and frankly much of the leadership seems to have a stupid, worthless, incompetent attitude (look up the Millennium Challenge 2002 for the one which had me screaming and shaking my fist at the waste and corruption). I'd appreciate redirecting some of that wasted & lost money to something useful, whether it's trains or something else.
(I have my own theories about how we should run the military, but they are really seriously off-topic: if you're curious, look up the book _The Generals_ by Thomas Ricks, and if that's too long, listen to the Nimitz lecture by Thomas Ricks, which is on YouTube.)
RyanS said:
It's not a left-right thing, it's an "are you an idiot" thing, and there's plenty of idiocy to go around.
Indeed. The military-industrial complex has been bipartisan for a looooong time, too....