Fox News reports that President Joe Biden traveled to Philadelphia on Friday to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Amtrak’s first train ride.
While there, Biden, who was reportedly known as “Amtrak Joe” for his propensity to ride the train from Delaware to D.C. for his job in the Senate, gave a brief address that, at least according to Sean Hannity, seemed to show the president getting “lost” and “struggling” to keep his story straight.
“Amtrak Joe”
During his remarks, Biden said “Amtrak wasn’t just a way of getting home” while he was a senator.
“It provided me, and I’m not joking, an entire other family — a community dedicated as a professional, and that we’ve shared milestones in my life, and I’ve been allowed to share milestones in theirs,” he said.
Biden went on to recount one occasion during which, as a senator, he was able to take the train back home on his birthday to blow out the candles on a birthday cake that his daughter had made for him. He then turned around and hopped back on the Amtrak train to make it to Washington for a vote in the upper chamber.
“If you think about it…”
Biden also told another story that, as Hannity noted, was particularly hard to follow.
The tale apparently recounted a time when Biden was vice president under former President Barack Obama.
“If you think about it, when we were, when I was vice president with Barack, he allowed me to put together a budget for Amtrak, and it had money for high-speed rail at 200 miles an hour from, from, uh — excuse me, from Charlotte, one, another line going from, in Florida down to Tampa, another line. If we had moved — we’d have that tunnel fixed in New York now. The money was there to get it done,” Biden said.
Plans ahead
According to Fox, “Amtrak was founded in 1971 as a for-profit operation, but from that year through 2017, taxpayers footed an $81 billion bill, and the company has never turned a profit.” Fox said the company “has traditionally relied upon annual appropriations to help pay for operations, including between $1.5 billion and nearly $2 billion in recent years.”
Now, as part of his multitrillion-dollar infrastructure proposal, the so-called American Jobs Plan, Biden is looking to put $80 billion into Amtrak and building new train routes across the country. “We have a huge opportunity here to provide fast, safe, reliable, clean transportation in this country,” the president said in his Friday talk, according to Breitbart.
The post Biden stumbles his way through speech for Amtrak 50th anniversary first appeared on Conservative Institute.
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