Definitely not a stimulus

The point of a stimulus, at least as I understand it, is to prevent economic collapse by shoring up the economy. Throwing good money after bad may be necessary for one reason or a number, but it's hard to call it a stimulus.

I was surprised to see Amtrak got an extra $1.3 Billion in the final stimulus package. We have been dumping money down Amtrak's maw for decades now, and periodically Congress issues an ultimatum: become a self-sustaining business in the next 5 years, or we'll pull the plug. Of course they never do. I went to wikipedia and looked up the amount of funding we've given Amtrak - wikipedia doesn't have complete figures, but they were interesting none the less:


I read this graph as showing empirically that stimulating Amtrak with billions of dollars is unlikely to produce any results. I believe there are a lot of worthless projects getting large amounts of money in this stimulus bill, and I'm doubtful that the money we're spending is likely to produce any useful results. The problem is, of course, that this debt burden is going to weigh heavily on me, either through increased taxes, or increased inflation. Time to buy gold & put money in my Roth IRA...