If You Charged $2.00 For A Soda, Would You Lose $?
on August 4th, 2012 at 5:49 am
What person couldn’t make a profit like that? You buy a 24 pack of soda at the local market for at about .75 cents (or less) per can and you can double your money. Heck if you have fountain drinks it is just pennies per glass. Soda is a very profitable venture for most restaurants. Plus I imagine that if you sold a cheeseburger for $9.00, you could find a way to make a profit. Especially if you have a captive audience, who have no other options for food.
Unless you’re the government run restaurants who are on AMTRAK trains.
In a house hearing, AMTRAK President Joe Boardman was grilled on why the railroad had lost well over $800 million on food service over the past 10 years. Just last year, AMTRAK lost over $80 million.
Only the government could run a restaurant on a train with a totally captive audience and lose almost a BILLION dollars over 10 years. According to one Congressman “The rail service’s food and beverage operation has 1,234 employees, and taking into account Amtrak’s $84.5 million loss last year, that’s $68,476 per employee.”
The worst part is that AMTRAK is mandated to just break even on food service. They aren’t even supposed to make a profit. And they charge $2.00 for a soda and LOSE money?!? Maybe if they were allowed to make a profit on the food service, they could at least offset some of the $1.5 billion in taxpayer dollars that keep AMTRAK in business every year.
Every year we throw trillions of our hard earned money into the Federal government’s coffers. And this is how they INVEST that money. Of course this is just a drop in the bucket compared to other government agencies.
I want a strong, effective military, but the waste and fraud that happens at the Pentagon is mind boggling. Back in 2009, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld admitted that “according to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.”
How about Medicaid? According to the CATO Institute, “losses to federal taxpayers from fraud, abuse, and other types of improper payments are in the ballpark of $100 billion a year or more.”
And don’t get me started on the Federal Reserve that has never been effectively audited.
This kind of fraud and abuse is rampant all through the budget. And if your representatives vote for a budget, they are funding ALL of this nonsense. At some point SOMEONE is going to have to stand up and say, “no more!”. But will it be done by Washington insiders who have a vested interest in keeping the status quo?
Not unless we start holding all of our representatives accountable for the mess we have allowed them to create.
