Northeast Corridor Profits and Amtrak Losses
In response to my previous post, it was pointed out to me that Amtrak finances can’t really be viewed in combination, but have to be split between the Northeast Corridor, the state-supported routes, and the long-distance trains. Long-distance is defined by a 750 mile (1,200 km) standard, comprising the night trains plus the Palmetto; these trains have especially poor financial performance. The question is what level of Northeast Corridor profitability is required to cover those losses.
In financial 2024 (ending 2024-09-30), Amtrak finances per route category were as follows, in millions of dollars or passenger-km or in dollars per p-km:
| Category | Ridership | P-km | Cost | Cost/p-km | Revenue | Revenue/p-km |
| NEC | 14 | 4,053.3 | 1,146.8 | 0.283 | 1,414.6 | 0.349 |
| State-supported | 14.5 | 2,972.6 | 1,110.7 | 0.374 | 859.2 | 0.289 |
| Long-distance | 4.3 | 3,505.8 | 1,261.2 | 0.36 | 626.1 | 0.179 |
The long-distance trains don’t actually have higher cost structure than the state-supported ones. Their greater losses are because fares are degressive in distance, and so the longer distances traveled translate to lower revenue per kilometer. This is also observable on some high-speed routes in Europe – the fares on TGVs using the LGV Sud-Est are very degressive, with little premium on Paris-Nice over Paris-Lyon despite the factor of 2.5 longer distance and factor of almost 3 longer time.
Revenue per passenger-km in France and Germany is around $0.15, as I explain in this post with links, and revenue per passenger-km in Japan is $0.25, both with average trip lengths similar to those of the Northeast Corridor and state-supported trains. Getting operating costs for just high-speed trains in France and Germany is surprisingly tricky; the Spinetta report says the TGV costs 0.06€/seat-km without capital, which at current seat occupancy is around 0.08€/p-km or around $0.11/p-km.
The upshot is that Northeast Corridor profits need to be $886.6 million a year to cover losses elsewhere, and if the operating costs on the corridor were the same as on the TGV, this could be achieved now with no further increases in service.
Now, in reality, high-speed rail would both massively increase ridership and also have to involve reducing fares to more normal levels than $0.35/p-km. If the revenue is $0.15/p-km and the cost is $0.11/p-km, then traffic in p-km has to rise to 22.165 billion/year, a fivefold increase, to cover. This is less implausible than it sounds – my gravity-based ridership model predicts about that ridership. Potentially, operating costs could be lower than on the TGV, if the entire corridor is (relatively) fast, with no long sections on slow lines as in France, and if traffic is less peaky than in France. But to first order, the answer to the profits question should be “probably but not certainly.”
Pedestrian Observations 
Amtrak has a (what I am told is profitable) service called AutoTrain. Between Lorton, VA and Sanford, FL (i.e. Washington DC and Orlando). The longest passenger trains in the world. Where do they fit in?
In this schema, they’re long-distance. But you’re right that they’re different. They cost $0.303/p-km to operate and get $0.321/p-km in revenue, making them slightly profitable. The operating costs per seat-km are very close to the long-distance average, but seat occupancy is higher since the train only makes two stops and doesn’t rely on turnover; the fares are much higher than the average because bringing a vehicle is mandatory and includes a large vehicle surcharge.
Some impressionistic observations about the Acela. Capacity is way down from pre-pandemic, trains more like every two hours than every hour. I imagine because trainsets are wearing out. Ridership has massively shifted away from business travel, but replaced by more non-business riders. Fares have returned to about what they were pre-pandemic. The new trainsets will bring capacity to a little more than pre-pandemic, I would think that will significantly increase the profitability of the NEC.
They appear to be running more Regionals. At speeds the premium trains ran at in the 50s. Sigh. Apparently ridership on Acela is about what it was and ridership on the Regionals is up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Corridor#Passenger_ridership
Taxpayers can’t invest in Amtrak at this point. Robotaxis based on EV technology will be operating at $0.50/mile (Arc Invest thinks they can get to $0.25/mile). That means a trip from DC to Manhattan will be about 2/3rds the cost and about the same time door to door. So cheaper, but without having to change modes of transport, without dealing with other passengers, without having to worry about missing your station. (Regional airlines will also have problems) If DC to Manhattan is disrupted, the cost structure for the whole system is screwed.
I’m literally linking to high-speed rail having operating costs of $0.11/p-km (with significant peakiness that doesn’t exist on the NEC) and an average speed higher than 200 km/h.
Driving is slower door-to-door now. Dumping a lane full of cars onto the New Jersey Turnpike isn’t going to make if faster. The IRS reimbursement rate for vehicle use in 2025 is 70 cents a mile. The user takes care of the paperwork to make the vehicle street legal, bringing it to maintenance and repair and keeping it clean.
Assuming robo cars ever work out it won’t be taxis that take over. They would be much cheaper than a human operated taxi, but most people who own a car will still find it better to keep owning their own care. Unless you drive far less than average (this sort of implies you live in a dense area and use transit) your costs won’t go down much in the best case, and your own car means you can leave things in it. Many people demand a nice car and that means the robo taxi needs to be a newer vehicle leaving plenty one the used market for people who don’t demand as nice and want cheaper.
The real value of robo-taxi is the robo-bus. If you don’t need to pay that expensive driver you can afford to run a lot more (more=better) service on local routes for the same price and this will increase ridership while being a lot cheaper than the robo-taxi – turning more cities into transit cities. The robo bus can also make the NYC-Boston trip in 4 hours, for a lot less than your robo-taxi and they can put in express routes to other places – want to get to Pittsfield, MA (population 40,000 – I picked a random city for this example), no train will to a city of that size, but a regular bus to where ever the neatest HSR station is makes a lot of sense and would get good ridership (particularly if the city uses the cheap robo-bus to provide good local service)
Two of them, the Lake Shore Limited Boston section and the Berkshire Flyer during the summer. It’s unclear, from Wikipedia, if Massachusetts is going to continue funding.
Well I’ll be… Pick a random town and it has service for no good reason. Well maybe it makes sense to run commuter/regional rail out to them, but long distant rail should be skipping anything of this size out east to gain more speed. (long distant rail should of course have dedicated tracks so they can get those high speeds needed to compete with air and car travel)
henrymiller74’s selection of Pittsfield was unfortunate, but the point stands. You could use Marlborough or Milford as example cities of the same size that are unserved by rail but could easily be served by busses.
Yet even Pittsfield proves the point. The Lake Shore Limited stops once a day in Pittsfield in the late afternoon, getting to Boston or Albany at 7-8 PM, making it useless to go to an appointment and get back in the same day. The Berkshire Flyer only operates on weekends in the summer – do people in Pittsfield possibly want to travel to NYC during the week or in April? Neither option will take someone to nearby cities with direct road links like Williamstown or Greenfield. A comprehensive bus network could do all of those things (possibly including rail, such as bus leaving several times a day timed to meet more frequent trains in Albany or Springfield to get to NYC/Boston).
@henrymiller74, that said, no long distance trains should be skipping stops to gain speed, because no matter how fast they go the long distance trains will never be competitive with air. Just don’t bother running the long distance train. Run frequent service on corridors between large cities with reasonable travel time instead, and the riders will come. Upgrade those corridors to HSR to increase the distance where the travel time is reasonable and they will come even more (note that in the specific case of Pittsfield, putting the resources of the Lake Shore Limited into an hourly Albany-Bos or Albany-Springfield train might be better than a bus, using this paradigm, especially if Springfield-Bos is upgraded to serve as a branch of the NEC).
When designing a long distance train to select your large Cities. Then you select a route which is a mix of geography and which cities are important enough to have a stop. Stops are a trade off between speed and access for people along the route. If you stop every 0.5km then even with infinite acceleration to infinite speed you average speed just because of the 15 seconds to stop (this is extremely low for a long distance train, but not impossible) limits you to 120kmh – at that point I’m going to drive because my car is door to door and once I’m there I have the advantages of a car (this of course means that I’m going to make other life choices about having a car like living in a low density suburb) Realistically you are going to stop longer, your acceleration is slower, and you have a top speed your trains can reach – but these are all factors that you can choose.
You are correct that you cannot compete on time with flying on very long distance routes, but for more reasonable train routes (up to 1500km) you can compete with flying – but only if you are not slowing down too much for all the stops. Every stop added is a trade off between lower speeds for those who don’t want to use that stop (this trip), and more people you can serve.
As a simple rule of thumb I’m going to suggest that 100km stop spacing is about right. You can go down to 50 if there is good justification, but by 200 you are too far and thus missing whatever is there (even if it is just desert – though if you are crossing that much desert your cities are probably too spread out to support rain in the first place, thus ensuring there will be a town of 50k people ever 100km or so to serve the farmers and such who live out there)
People in Pittsfield aren’t stupid, they take the bus if they don’t want to drive. It’s not 1888 anymore and almost everyone in what was Berkshire County has a car or access to one.
Albany to Springfield goes through mountains, it squiggles all over. Making it faster than a bus doesn’t make sense. Pick the tunnels and viaducts that make it possible to travel between Boston and Albany in around an hour. Because north and west of Albany there will be high speed tracks for the New York market. And the Philadelphia market. Washington D.C. if it’s fast enough. ( The Albany to Montreal part of the trip is “free”. The Albany to Toronto or Chicago part of the trip is “free”. ) Sometime in the 23rd Century at the rate we are upgrading.
More fairy story stuff from the tech industry.
There is no way that robo-taxis will ever be cheaper to run than a human run car.
The sensors and mapping will always cost more than the human driver controls.
Like maybe they will eventually be cheaper than a human driven taxi, but we are still a way off that.
Tesla operates without LiDAR and without a world map. They will produce the vehicles in quantity for about $25k. Service begin in June in Austin. That’s where Arc Investment works out this projections.
Tesla cars keep crashing into stuff.
As opposed to all those other car brands that never crash?
It is a guarantee that self driving cars will have a lower crash rate than human driven cars. Humans get tired, get drunk, get distracted, make mistakes, etc., while machines just operate reliably. There is always the possibility that crash rates might be higher at the beginning when technology is new, but long term we know exactly what will happen.
The experience of the airline industry is illustrative. There are the occasional dramatic crashes that result from some flaw in the programming or design (Air France 447, Boeing 737 Max issues) but the increasing automation in flight controls over the past few decades has seen a dramatic drop in commercial aviation deaths, even as total passenger travelers has increased dramatically.
Tesla has more fatalities than any other car brand. Musk is trying to stay out of prison and avoid bankruptcy and deportation that is why he is doing what he is
The study showing Tesla has the most fatalities used data starting in 2017 when Tesla had only about 200k cars on the road (today they produce 150k per month) it is highly subject to small sample size bias.
More relevant is that in 2024 Tesla had the highest accident rate of major car brands. But the majority of those crashes were the result of DUI and speeding, which has something to do with the type of person that buys Teslas, not anything to do with the cars or self driving features. The accident rate is almost equal to that of Ram and Subaru – can you attribute those two brands’ issues to autonomous capability?
Finally, I was not speaking of Tesla’s specifically, but self driving generally. Computers do not get drunk or speed if programmed not to, long term their accident and fatality rate will be lower. Even if Tesla’s current/former Autopilot feature was flawed, those flaws will be fixed, or other manufacturers without flaws will win out. There used to be over 600-1,000 airliner crash deaths per year as recently as the mid 2000’s – the past decade it has averaged around 300. Airline travel has gone up 2.5 times since 2004. We don’t need to wonder what will happen to safety with autonomous cars.
Musk has been a naturalized US citizen for over two decades. Dislike him and his policies if you want, but claiming he could be deported puts you in league with people who claim Obama was born in Indonesia. Stick to facts and reality, don’t become a mirror image of the people you dislike on the other side.
They don’t have a few hundred million years of evolution training the wetware how to move around. It will probably be lower, someday. We won’t know if DOGE gets it’s way and eliminates the reporting requirements. I suspect the insurers will screech loud enough about that.
They don’t have a few hundred million years of evolution training the wetware how to move around
Waymo has driverless vehicles taking passengers on city streets today, right now. Other groups (Zoox, etc.) are not far behind. This isn’t a question of if it will happen in a few hundred million years, or even in a few years – it has already happened.
I didn’t say it will take hundreds of millions of years. I said the animals have been training that long.
I’ve also seen the video of a whiz bangiest one get thoroughly confused and give up. And the ones where it doesn’t recognize emergency vehicles and mows down a few responders before crashing into one of the vehicles with flashing lights. I’m waiting for the day when one of them gets confused in the middle of intersection and stops. Which makes the other ones stop.
Tesla in the UK are in the same insurance group as Ferraris.
@Adirondacker
“I’ve also seen the video of a whiz bangiest one get thoroughly confused and give up. And the ones where it doesn’t recognize emergency vehicles and mows down a few responders before crashing into one of the vehicles with flashing lights. I’m waiting for the day when one of them gets confused in the middle of intersection and stops. Which makes the other ones stop.”
I’m sure there are videos of driverless cars getting confused, but there are hundreds of them operating on city streets every day that don’t get confused. When was that video of the “whiz bangiest one” from? I’ve seen a video of a rocket blowing up on the pad in the 1950’s, that doesn’t mean that no rocket has ever launched successfully since.
You have not seen even one video (let alone multiple “ones”) of driverless vehicles mowing down a few responders and crashing into a vehicle because it has never happened. Multiple search engine queries fail to show a single example; Google’s AI even starts off the results with the summary “While there haven’t been documented cases of driverless vehicles directly killing first responders“. There were a number of cases in 2023 of driverless vehicles in San Francisco obstructing emergency responders (driving through without stopping, or stopping and not moving when they should), but 75% of those were vehicles from Cruise that were subsequently pulled from testing in California. Waymo and Zoox are in active use, and yet in 2024 there were some months with 0 reported incidents of driverless vehicles interfering with emergency services. Of course, cars with drivers often interfere with first responders (don’t pull over, park and block fire hydrants, etc.) so this isn’t some driverless car only issue.
Give it up. Driverless vehicles are here. They drive around every day picking up and dropping off passengers on city streets in mixed traffic without any of the widespread accidents or confusion or all the other problems you think they cause. Someone in the 1950’s thought that automatic elevators would never work out (what if someone presses two buttons at the same time? what if a relay wears down or shorts out? the system will never handle a power surge or be able to reset from a power outage). You will sound as foolish as they do now when none of their concerns came true.
I don’t do this for a living. I would suggest not relying on AI for much of anything.
Whoever though automatic elevators, in the 50s, wouldn’t work out was a Luddite or grossly uninformed. I spent 40, 50 perhaps 60 seconds finding a citable source.
https://usmodernist.org/AF/AF-1952-04.pdf
Alt+F should bring up a search box in your PDF reader. Should but who knows what your reader will do. Page 5 is full page ad from Westinghouse proclaiming their Selectomatic and the wonders it’s electrical brain does. ….. You can be sure if it’s Westinghouse… And ads from Otis and others. None of them mention how easy it is for the attendant. Nice view of the passenger pressing a floor button alllllllllll by herself, without instruction or explanation, in one of them. Which tells me by 1952 everybody was familiar with the operation of attendantless elevators.
I don’t do this for a living. Perhaps you’d like to ask AI to find some videos for you. I went old-school and typed “driverless car traffic jam” into YouTube’s search box. There seems to be recent ones. Perhaps what they need is someone to speak to them in a soothing voice and tell them to move carefully out of the way. Some of them were honking. That is illegal in most places. Honking is for “danger” and stopped traffic isn’t a danger. Being confused and blocking an intersection is mildly amusing. Until an emergency vehicle needs to get through.
So as I stated, your claim to have seen multiple videos of self driving cars hitting first responders was a lie, because the videos don’t exist, and you cannot point to the ones that you claimed to have seen.
Putting “driverless car traffic jam” into YouTube brings up multiple videos all referencing the same incident in Austin involving a group of Cruise self driving cars. Cruise is the company I reference earlier that was pulled from California streets because of problems at a few emergency responses. GM folded the company a few months ago. Clearly they didn’t get it, but their cars also will never drive again. Another video referenced multiple smaller issues in San Francisco, again all Cruise. There is also one video of a similar incident with Waymo in Phoenix, but the company was able to clear the problem.
I’m not sure why driverless cars being in, or even causing, a traffic jam is such a big deal . Cars with drivers in them cause traffic jams every day, and it is just as much a problem if emergency vehicles are blocked by those traffic jams too.
“Whoever though automatic elevators, in the 50s, wouldn’t work out was a Luddite or grossly uninformed.”
I agree with this. Unfortunately for you, the same applies to anyone in the 2020’s who thinks driverless cars won’t work out.
Adirondacker is right, and I would say probably it was obvious from the very beginning when Otis demoed his safety contraptions (late 19th century?). That’s because it was obvious to anyone riding the things that what the operator was doing was hardly onerous or complicated. Heck, they even let women and …. do it. Onux has repeated his analogy so many times but why, when it is so weak? An elevator is on guide rails, cannot collide with another elevator or people or walls etc. It has extremely delimited movement etc.
It cannot compare to free driving on open public streets in dense cities where the hazards, complex multi choice routes, unpredictable vehicles, bikes, pedestrians, children, animals, lighting, weather, transient repair work, other vehicle accidents etc is many, many log-orders worse than an elevator.
Having said that it probably will happen. Though scale up from the current experiments might reveal more “hidden” weaknesses. I am sure American cities will adopt them because, you know, tech billionaires get what they want. But I hope Paris keeps them out, if necessary by a referendum like for Lime. “Paris (and all cities) for people, not for cars”, self-driving or otherwise. Logically that would also remove all taxis and that wouldn’t upset me as I hate them too (I was cheering Sam Kerr in her court case last week, in part because once at near midnight in London–arriving on Eurostar to find the LU was not working–I too was locked inside a black cab with an obstreperous cabbie who should never had had this ability to restrict passenger’s liberty. Are driverless cabs going to have this ability?)
Then there is the scenario in which the AIs controlling these things becomes sentient and then all the millions of driverless cabs transition simultaneously and start eliminating humans. Admittedly a harder job than if they controlled the nuclear arms system …. but with millions of them on the streets they could cause a mass killing. Of course it could simply be a bunch of malevolent techbros in Moscow having a laff.
Or, my favourite response: The Cars That Ate Paris (1974). Already this year I have had to apply heroic self-control, to suppress keying every Tesla I see.
Humans are expensive. Not only do you have to pay them, but they also like to work nice shifts, and you need to train them. They also need managers and back office dispatch. Robo bus – if they ever get it working – will easially pay for itself in just a few months. Of course only time will tell if they ever get it working – the investment is so high we need all the current car sales to justify it.
OTOH, if it ever works out there is reason to suspect that it will be far safer than human drivers. Yes Tesla cars keep crashing into stuff – but so do human driven cars, the question is what is statistically better – Tesla seems to be at least as good as average (but remember average includes people driving drunk – I have not seen an unbiased source of statistics). This likely to be safer is something that ought to scare every auto manufacture: as soon as someone can prove their robo driver is safer they will have incentive to ban everything else so you better be just as far along in development or your market dies. (even if only say France bans human driven new cars that will be significant to the bottom line)
“This is why we will always have elevator operators. Computers are huge and take up a whole room, using one to control elevators will always cost more than a human.” -someone in the 1940s no doubt
The human controls are extremely cheap. The electronics will very much struggle to cost as little as the human controls.
Like sure being cheaper than a taxi is believable.
Right, which is why when you step in an elevator you greet the operator and tell them what floor you want to go to, because human controls are so cheap compared to electronics.
Electronics are actually very cheap. Have you ever heard of the computer chip, and how cheap processing power and storage are today versus 20 years ago let alone 40-50? Many cars probably already have the computing power inside them to be run autonomously (for entertainment systems, diagnostics, mapping/directions, etc.) it is just a case of adding the sensors and developing the programming.
No. the analogy is that rather than choosing your floor by pressing a button an AI figures out where you want to go.
No, there is no autonomous car that reads your mind and figures out where you want to go, a rider in such a vehicle would input an address they want to go to. Figuring out the route to that address is not some AI magic, cars have had GPS navigation showing a route and a list of turns since the 1990s (I’m guessing most car trips these days involve a computer “figuring out where to go” with Waze, Google Maps, etc.). With self driving you need a computer to figure out which combination of throttle, brake and wheel inputs to follow that route – directly analogous to a computer determining the motor/brake inputs needed to bring an elevator from one particular floor to another (admittedly more complex because cars are not on rails and share the road with other vehicles).
Even if the lift did it with voice recognition it would still be more expensive and less reliable than buttons. And voice recognition is pretty good for simple commands.
If taxis could be sold for 25 cents a mile then it would be happening and in some countries where labour is cheap people would use that rather than owning a car.
You don’t need computers to automate elevators. You don’t need computers to automate a lot of things. Clever arrangements of switches and specialized switches called relays can do all sorts of complicated things.
A Mr. Sprague of streetcar fame and multiple unit control for them and a Mr. Siemens, that Mr. Siemens, were attempting various aspects of elevator automation in the late 19th Century. And others. According to Wikipedia they were successfully automated by 1900. Well before computers or the vacuum tubes to create them were invented.
“No, no. Full Self-Driving will be in the next software download. We promise. For sure this time. Really.”
It’s amazing that Tesla fanboys are still a thing.
The question is what level of Northeast Corridor profitability is required to cover those losses.
The question itself is flawed. Amtrak should not bother to cover the losses of long distance trains because it should not be running them. The overnight transcontinental trains provide no worthwhile transportation benefit as a whole (planes are faster, for a family/group a car is cheaper at the same speed) and for the edge cases it does (residents of small towns along the way) it provides worse benefit than would nationally subsidized bus routes (bus routes can provide travel in more directions than the two directions of a train, they can be scheduled to arrive at better than the 3 am arrival/departures some towns see, and they can provide lifeline travel service to other small towns not on the rail line). These trains are by and large recreational activities, and should no more be run by a transportation agency than Carnival Cruise Lines.
Profit from the NEC should be reinvested in improving it or expanding its reach (branches to Albany, Richmond, etc.) or in the “state supported” corridors that provide good transportation value due to length / route / market size (California lines, lines centered on Chicago, etc.).
Note that sections of the long distance lines comprise reasonable corridors and should be maintained, but with stand-alone frequent daytime service that people will actually use, not once per day land cruises (examples are Phoenix to LA, Houston to San Antonio, perhaps a North Dakota tail to Minneapolis-Chicago as the spine of a great plains essential bus service network, etc.)
I though questioning the subsidies of the stouthearted volk of Real America(tm) was divisive and incorrect.
There is no inconsistency or contradiction in either of my positions.
First, I never made any judgement about rural Americans being better than anyone else (“stouthearted volk”, etc.) Just the opposite I said that getting into “cities pay more taxes” or “rural areas have the mines” arguments are the divisive thing because neither area is better than the other, and both rely on each other. Instead I gave logical arguments why a net subsidy isn’t indicative of rural residents getting some kind of special handouts, but an artifact of higher payments (in Social Security/Medicare) to older people everywhere but older people being a larger share of rural population, and other valid reasons per capita expenditures are not equal everywhere (for instance the National Park Service probably pays more in Wyoming (population 584k) than it does in New York City (population 8.258M) not because Wyoming is getting unfairly rewarded but because Yellowstone is huge but the NPS manages a handful of national monuments and historic sites in NYC).
Second, I wasn’t directly arguing against subsidies, but how they are used. If you read closely you will see I was arguing that transportation funding would be better served running an Essential Bus Service (analogous to the subsidized airfare of the Essential Air Service) for rural communities than the current very limited cross country Amtrak service. Arguing that the Second Avenue Subway should be built instead of extending the Rockaway Beach Shuttle to Breezy Point does not mean one is arguing against expanding the NY Subway at all, just that some Subway extensions are better than others (or some valid and some not). If we are going to spend money on transportation for the rural parts of America, a train that stops in Minot (pop 47k) but not Bismark (pop 75k) or requires someone in Minot to board around 11PM to get to Minneapolis is not the way to do it.
Moral grounds doesn’t involve judgements?
My moral position is that you shouldn’t make judgments about people based on where they live. People living in the country side and people living in cities are both deserving of being treated fairly and of receiving government services, even if those services are sometimes subsidized unevenly. One can have a discussion about the level and type of services or infrastructure to fund without resorting to childish name calling (“Real Americans(tm)”) or petty bigotry about people who live somewhere different than you.
You spelled “white” wrong.
I guess I’m gonna have to quote you again.
That’s where they live.
Do they pay you by the word or the apology? Or do you apologize for masochism of it all, for free?
@plaws0, in terms of prioritising the suburbs over the big cities that is prioritising swing voters😜
Real Americans(tm) are almost always white. And heterosexual. Almost always Christian, with local variants of which Protestant denomination is preferred. The first Catholic was elected president in 1960 and it wasn’t until 2020 that the second was elected. At least Biden didn’t have to give a speech assuring the anti-papists he wouldn’t be taking orders from the Pope. And heterosexual. In traditional gender roles. Or at least proclaim that they are. Almost always from someplace other than a big city. Because big cities are cesspits of sin, crime, depravity and garlic eating. Interracial garlic eating too. Where the Hindus eat bagels!! At least they have muted it to things like garlic eating and “San Francisco values”. You do understand that “San Francisco values” is dog whistle for … non traditional gender roles…. They want everyone to have the freedom to be exactly like them. And the liberty to promulgate the dogma.
Much more complicated than skin color.
…sort of. The modern alt-right really will take anyone, as long as they’re racist. You can be a black racist like Candace Owens, a Jewish racist like Ben Shapiro, etc.
…. Enrigue Tarrio..
I said almost always. The alt-right is different from Real American(tm) though there is a lot of overlap. They almost always have gotten much better at hiding their disdain and distaste for people not-WASP. Which then makes it easier for the not-WASP-etc. people to delude themselves into thinking they are part of the clique.
@plaws0
I placed “Real Americans ™” in quotes not because I was using it, but because it is a phrase commonly used by Adirondacker to denigrate people who live in rural areas and/or non-coastal areas and/or conservative states. It is an example of the urban vs rural sniping that both Adi and Alon engage in that I am criticizing and rejecting. Ironically, and sadly, although they criticize those people not like them (i.e. non-city dwellers or non-left wingers) as bigoted, they display an equal level of bigotry with such name-calling or suggestions that rural areas are freeloaders getting inappropriately funded by city dweller taxes.
I reject this paradigm and do not think anyone should be judged by where they live, or by the color of their skin. Given that 80% of the US population is urban, the majority of the conservatives in the country live in cities not rural areas, which makes Adirondacker’s entire conception of them as an ‘other’ living ‘elsewhere’ to be totally false.
@Adirondacker
“I guess I’m gonna have to quote you again.
That’s where they live.”
That’s where who lives? All the racists and terrible people? White, heterosexual, Christian people?
First, as I noted, 80% of the US is urban, so White, heterosexual, Christian people are in fact quite likely to live in a city, despite your crude characterization.
Second, my entire point has been that per capita funding is higher in rural areas for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with politics, or race, or religion, or anything else other than geometry. If an air traffic control radar covers 1,000 sqkm, and you have a 500 sqkm city surrounded by 4,500 sqkm of rural land, then 80% of your FAA radar funding is being spent in rural areas, and only 20% on a radar station in a city (I’m aware radars cover a much larger area, I’m using round numbers for an example). On a spreadsheet you can make that look like a net tax benefit to the rural areas (because they are not paying 80% of taxes). You can repeat for weather radars, national parks, river navigation (locks and canals), roads and railways, etc. And of course the big one, if people in rural areas and older and receiving social security while people in cities are younger and paying into it, that will look like a net tax difference when really it is the system working exactly as designed and again nothing to do with any of your rants about values or gender roles or anything else.
Just stop with the stereotypes and prejudice.
I see they pay you by the word.
Real Americans(tm) call themselves Real American(tm). Perhaps you would prefer I take their advice to ignore all this political-correctness-run-amok and call them subsidy sucking yokels? How’s rural welfare queens sit with you? …Though “amok” isn’t very Anglo-Saxon. Perhaps a poor choice.
How come the wannabe WASPs get to sneer at coastal elites but the garlic eaters who aren’t very elite can’t sneer back? Or the bagel eaters? Stopping the stereotyping etc. works both ways. Though Real Americans(tm) have a lot of prejudices, that should work all ways.
Yes, stopping the sterotyping works both ways. No one in rural areas should be sneering at people who live in cities. The fact that some do does not mean it is acceptable if you do it in the opposite direction. It just means you are as petty and bigoted as they are.
“subsidy sucking yokels”. Once again, a net subsidy in federal spending vs federal taxes at the state level does not mean that people in rural areas are getting subsidies, or that the federal government is funding their parks departments, or paying their electric bills, or what not. There are two Air Force bases in North Dakota and none in New England (no flying bases that there, there are some Air Force installations without runways). This means a lot of “federal spending” in North Dakota that isn’t paving local streets or buying fire trucks for rural towns or anything else that resembles a subsidy.
“Rural welfare queens”. The ‘welfare queen’ driving a Cadillac was long ago shown to be a myth based on a single woman who was committing welfare fraud, not poor people suddenly living the high life because they qualified for food stamps. Suggesting that rural welfare recipients are somehow not deserving of their benefits because they are poor, or that they are living a luxurious subsidized life means 1) You are ignorant of history for thinking that welfare queens are/were a thing, and 2) Once again you are just as bigoted as the conservatives you claim to hate, bringing up a falsehood about rural people undeservedly getting benefits, no different than the rural people who bring up falsehoods about urban people undeservedly getting benefits.
Why do the people being sneered at by whole television networks have to be the ones to stop the sneering? I sincerely hope you are getting paid well to apologize endlessly. Go fuck off.