President Obama is asking passengers to pay a few dollars more in taxes for an airline ticket...Those "few dollars more" are actually a $100 fee per departure. I have made made numerous round trip flights between the Bay Area and Los Angeles, San Diego or Las Vegas for less than this proposed $200 tax. Those flights, which are available even now, will double in price instantly. The $450 business-ticket round trip flights I take to Las Vegas periodically will suddenly become $650 flights. This weekend our family will travel to Orange County to attend a family memorial service on round trip tickets we could afford with frequent flyer credits. Those tickets would increase by $800 under the president's proposal, which would have made them unaffordable.
Maybe it takes people who are accustomed to traveling on business class or first class tickets that cost thousands of dollars, or who always travel on expense accounts and never see what tickets cost, to conceive of a plan to increase round trip tickets by $200 that takes no account of what a shock to the system that is for the rest of us. The $200 increase will be a drop in the bucket to a traveler who is already spending $2000 or more for that ticket, or for someone who neither knows nor cares how much the ticket costs. For most people, however, the cost of an airline trip, especially if traveling as a family, already pushes personal budgets to the limit. Now comes the proposal to effectively double the cost of travel for the many who carefully plan their trips. Increasing the cost of any good or service 50-to-100% in one fell swoop simply by the imposition of a tax is unconscionable. The airlines are crying foul, and for good reason. Speaking as someone for whom airline travel is a luxury that is just barely within reach, and only for the right occasion under the right circumstances, it is an absolute certainty that airline ridership will decline. The proposed tax will damage the airlines directly, but also all of the many industries and businesses that depend on people who travel via air for vacations.
Airline travel seems poised to return to its roots, priced out of reach of the vast majority of travelers. Perhaps that is what our ruling class would prefer.
2 comments:
Until you start flying around in your own LearJet, you don't have to worry about these fees. They are proposed only for General Aviation -- corporate and private aircraft the currently don't pay their fair share of the costs of the US air-traffic system. Commercial flights already pay their share and are not included in the proposal. Nor are piston aircraft, military and emergency flights or any that don't require air-traffic control supervision (my ultralight flies free!).
The $100 fee is per flight, not per passenger. These aircraft now pay about $60 so we're talking about an increase on a par with the tip these guys drop on the lad that totes their bags from the limo to the jet and back.
This is a part of the proposal to make millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share of costs. I'm with Warren Buffett on this one, though we haven't discussed it recently.
So until you have a garage large enough for a new Gulfstream, you needn't worry about the extra $40 being assessed to the jet-setters.
Well, there go my plans for picking up a Gulfstream, then. Bummer. That $100 priced me right out of it.
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