By Art Carden, Contributor, Forbes; March 29, 2019
My recent article arguing that we should cut federal subsidies to Amtrak got some very interesting and useful feedback on social media with at least one reader making the point that the highways and the airways are also very heavily subsidized by governments at all levels. I plan to expand on this in a future column and will note that “if we’re subsidizing it, we should stop” is a good rule of thumb, but here I’d like to go into some of the reasons why subsidies remain even when it is pretty clear that the costs exceed the benefits.