Hallelujah for the federal government! Hallelujah for federal takeovers of the private economy! Hallelujah for socialism that means people much poorer than Chris Matthews are subsidizing Chris Matthews’ Amtrak travel.
Wednesday night on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” lik almost all of his elite media colleagues, host Chris Matthews spent most of the hour exploiting the Amtrak tragedy to demand America’s already over-burdened taxpayers add even more billions to the $45 billion we’ve already thrown down the Amtrak rat hole.
Although fewer than 10% of American use Amtrak, Matthews still wants 100% of us to further fund the Amtrak boondoggle.
Then Matthews said something very interesting….
He admitted that he has been riding fairly regularly on Amtrak for a half-century.
That’s right ladies and gentlemen-taxpayers of the jury, YOU have been subsidizing millionaire Chris Matthews’ Amtrak train fares for a full half-century (or at least since 1971 when the government started Amtrak).
Judging by his biography, from at least the mid-seventies, there is no moral reason those of us who make less money than Chris Matthews should have been subsidizing Chris Matthews’ train fare.
Once Matthews jumped into bed with NBC News as the host of “Hardball” in 1997, the idea that those of us making much less than his gajillion dollar windfall subsidized his train fare is an immoral abomination.
Here are 11 facts those in the media, like Chris “Multi-Millionaire” Matthews, don’t want you to know. Number eight is the most pertinent here:
With a ridership of only 25 million people, that means for every person boarding a train, the American people are paying $60. I did a quick check on Amtrak’s Web site – to travel from New York City to Washington, D.C., will cost the traveler $69. Does it make sense that it costs the person traveling $69 and the American government $60?
You read that correctly, every single time Chris “Multi-Millionaire” jumps on an Amtrak, struggling taxpayers who will never even use Amtrak, pick up $60 of his freight.
But did Matthews even once suggest that maybe, just maybe, that the people who actually use Amtrak should be the ones subsidizing it.
Did Matthews even once bring up how immoral it is for those less fortunate than him to subsidize his train fare.
Of course not.
I don’t mean to single out Matthews. The last study I could find found that a whopping 80% of Amtrak welfare queens are not poor, and therefore many, if not most, could afford to pay the fare required to end federal subsidies, and even make Amtrak profitable. Due to their welfare queening greed, though, Amtrak is and always has been losing hundreds of millions of dollars every year.
Keep in mind that many of the wealthy who welfare queen along Amtrak’s Acela line, between the Emerald Cities of Washington DC and Manhattan, are the very same members of the elite media on your TV right now claiming Amtrak is under-funded.
Here’s a smart-take: Maybe if the elite media paid full fare, Amtrak could have afforded the equipment that would have prevented Tuesday night’s tragic crash.
Chris Matthews took a taxpayer-subsidized ride … and people died.
John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC