[patton]

Are you on drugs, or just bad at math? Buy a ticket on Amtrack, you pay 1/7th of the cost - I pay the rest?

This is the best ROI you can find?

[muawiyah]

I'm not on drugs but you show every sign of being on them yourself.

Here you have Amtrak recovering 1/7 of the cost of it's service from those who use it.

Now, please turn your attention to Department of Commerce. They spend billions of dollars. How much of that is recovered directly from those who benefit from the work of this department?

I think the answer is ZERO ZERO ZERO ZERO ZERO.

Amtrak is actually doing better than Commerce.

If you wanted to argue the case along the lines of ROI, profits, etc., fine, but you wanted to argue the case along the lines of "theft", with taxes identified as the quantity stolen.

I'm happy enough to go along with that, but if you want to evaluate Amtrak that way, please evaluate all the other agencies the same way. We might even consider that the White House itself (distinct from the President) recovered absolutely nothing from it's users except when Bill Clinton was loaning out the bedrooms.