How is this fundamentally different from the “my kids don’t go to school so I shouldn’t have to pay property taxes” people? Relax it’s a public good, the FAA. Everyone benefits from a public good.
The fundamental difference is the direction of the redistribution.
The capitalist system inherently distributes from poor to rich. With no state involved, a capitalist system strictly and always devolves into one person (or a very small group) owning everything and everyone else being owned by them. That’s why we have states that do have redistribution systems that try to counteract that: We have progressive tax systems that tax the rich more than the poor to fund free (or at least subsidized) public good systems.
To get back to your example: The rich don’t need free schools. Even without free public education, they would still be able to afford to send their kids to expensive private schools. A free school program is there to mostly benefit the poor.
Redistribution systems that redistribute from poor to rich on the other hand are inherently broken. The base economic system already does that redistribution from poor to rich, so allowing the rich to mooch even more off the system is not a good idea.
Keep in mind that as soon as the FAA becomes funded by billionaires their primary responsibility is to the billionaire instead of the flying public. Much in the way that the police are employed by the rich and could give fuck-all about ordinary citizens.
But even if this tax was reduced or went away, what’s stopping the airlines from hiking up the price by that amount? Airlines are looking for any excuse to squeeze out more money from you. In that case you’d just be funding the airline execs’ private flights.
How would that even work? Commercial airlines and private jet operators are different entities.
This is about taxes funding the FAA, and the implied conclusion of the video isn’t that these taxes should be removed, but that they should be weighted more heavily towards private flights for the sake of fairness.
But how can you expect me to think about things like this, when there’s a possibility of someone with genitals that don’t look like mine in my restroom?
Have you ever seen a ducks penis? Just be glad whatever genitals you have isn’t a ducks penis. It’s so fucked up that they don’t even GET a bathroom. They just pee in the drinking water. They pee in lakes. Ponds. Your bathtub. They pee anywhere they want, any time they want.
Thats why they all hang out at parks, and the government doesn’t stop them. Think about it man. You don’t see lions and tigers and bears at the park…because Disney owns the rights to The Wizard of Oz. So you can’t see those animals for free! They gotta get locked up in jail and then they call it a zoo, and charge you $22.50 per adult, and $12 per child under 12. Except on Mondays where it’s free if you’re a local resident of the county.
But they don’t do that with ducks. You know what else Disney owns? The Mighty Ducks. Darkwing Duck.
And NOBODY is paying money to see those properties. So they don’t arrest the ducks, because theres no profit there. Follow the money. It all leads back to those crazy duck penis’s, and nobody wants to admit that Howard the Duck is officially a Marvel character, living in the same MCU as Spiderman, and Ironman, and the X-Men.
THATS why ducks don’t have bathrooms, while humans fight over things like trans athletes being allowed to play sports in college, and throwing green dildos at female basketball players to promote cryptocurrencies.
We live in the dumbest timeline.
And yet Donald doesn’t even wear pants.
I’m going to right now start the conspiracy theory that the actual US president, Donald Trump, has not worn pants or underwear in decades. He’s somehow just hypnotized us all into not noticing.
Except on Mondays where it’s free if you’re a local resident of the county.
I read this and immediately knew who posted it.
First class and business pays for the economy seats
While that’s true, and so First Class and Business Class subsidize private jets more than Economy Class does, that doesn’t change the fact that Economy also subsidizes private jets.
While that’s true, and so First Class and Business Class
Iwhats the math on this claim
TL;DR: Yes, you subsidize, because the amount each seat pays is proportional to their ticket price, but it’s a small amount per flight. But you also need to think about what you consider “fair” in this instance.
Sorry, been offline for a few days. I’m curious, so let’s check the math:
Their example is a flight from Atlanta to Orlando. The most common flight on that route is a Delta B757-2001. SeatGuru can provide us with the most common seating layout: 24 First class, 21 Comfort+, and 135 Economy.
The tax that the NYT Editorial Board is looking at is mostly likely the 7.5% Passenger Ticket Tax, which is about 1/3 of total fees on a two-leg itinerary2.
Looking at Delta’s fares for about two months out on randomly chosen dates in October, I see economy fares of about $270, economy plus at about $350, and first at about $570 (I tried to take a median, but it’s very approximate). Those fares are round-trip, so let’s cut them in half for $135/175/285. At 7.5%, the tax comes out to ~$10.13/13.13/21.38 per seat. That tallies up to $2156.40 when we multiply out by the number of seats, pretty close to the $2300 value the video claims, so I’m comfortable saying my numbers are “right enough” for the example.
Depending on how one structures the ownership of their private jet, the equivalent tax for them is zero dollars (they are exempt).
There are then taxes that both flights would pay on a per flight basis or based on fuel consumed. A private jet would pay proportionally more of those than a commercial airliner (due to the lower % passenger weight of total weight), but those are a small part of the total fees, especially for the commercial flight. (I’m seeing about $300 per plane, so I think NYT was counting some of those fees but not all, as they said that the private jet would be paying about $60 in fees).
The problem with the whole “subsidizing” conversation is that it depends on what perspective you take. If you look at it on a person-by-person basis, then sure, each passenger on the commercial flight probably pays less than the passengers on the private jet (assuming 2 ppl or something).
But FAA resources aren’t provisioned on a “per-passenger” basis, they’re provisioned on a “per-flight” basis, with some modifiers based on:
- Origin and destination airspaces: busier ATC spaces require more resources, and the gain for an additional resource is not linear because of handoffs;
- Size of plane: bigger planes do take up “more room” in the sky, and therefore tax the ATC more than smaller planes, plus they compete for larger runways, where smaller planes can use smaller runways at airports that have them;
- Distance flown: Planes that fly farther use more ATC resources en-route.
Let’s be generous and say that our B757-200 takes 4x the ATC resources that the private jet does (I would bet the real factor is closer to 1.5-2.5x). So for a total of 5 units of ATC resource, 4 are used by the commercial jet, and 1 is used by the private jet.
The commercial flight therefore pays $(2156.40+60)/4=$554.10 per ATC resource, and the private jet pays $60 per ATC resource. Equal distribution would be $(2156.40 + 60 + 60)/5=$455.28. So the private jet is receiving a “subsidy” of $455.28-60=$395.28 per flight.
If we divide that subsidy over all of the passengers on the flight by fare, then we get about $1.81/2.34/3.81 based on seat class. That isn’t much of a subsidy per passenger, about 1.4% of your ticket price.
But let’s think about the other side of the equation: Chartering a plane from Atlanta to Orlando costs about $12,5003. Taking on an extra $395.28 would be an additional 3.2% per flight, which is admittedly more than the 1.4% of the fare for the commercial passenger.
And hold on… we are talking about passenger transport when we’re talking about both flights… so let’s look at how efficiently those FAA resources are used. Keeping that 4x factor for a flight of the same distance, we have 4 FAA resources spread over a flight with a capacity of 180, let’s assume 80% full for 144 passengers, using about 0.03 FAA resources/person. Now let’s look at the private jet, which recall uses 1 FAA resource for the same flight plan. Let’s be generous and assume 6 passengers. That’s 0.17 FAA resources/person. The commercial jet is more than 5x more efficient in its use of FAA resources.
These are people who literally create complex corporate structures for their private jets just to avoid that 7.5% excise tax, AND they tend to have much more disposable income. I think they can pay the extra $400 for their inefficient use of FAA resources.
If I were making the rules (which is absurd because not only am I not an expert but I am also Canadian), I would make the FAA fees per-itinerary filed with the FAA and incorporate three factors:
- Category of departing and landing airports4
- Takeoff weight of aircraft
- Itinerary flight path length
The FAA has a whole section on their website about airport planning, so I would use that to figure out how to apportion these factors to best approximate the factors required for FAA resource allocation. I’m sure there are planners at the FAA that have this all broken down already.
So yes, unless you get a super-discount fare, you are subsidizing private jets assuming that the fair apportionment of costs is based on how FAA resource capacities are planned. It’s not much per passenger, but it adds up across all of society, and is another way that the US economy moves wealth from the lower classes to the upper class.
Yeah I flew for $20 not too long ago. No bags, just a small backpack. I wasn’t subsidizing shit, more expensive seats were subsidizing me.
Please do explain to the class how.
Theyee probably right. We’d need to work out how much money their tickets are vs how much space they take up and compare that ratio to economy.
Ehhhh. I wasn’t very impressed with this video. For one thing, it felt more like a compilation of aviation-related clips rather than any kind of meat and potato that actually described the issue.
When they finally did, they started with the parking ramp analogy. If that truly is a good analogy, it’s not so much that a “fancy” car would pay less, it’s that a smaller car would. Pretty much any parking lot, ferry, etc that can hold different sizes of cars will charge more for a bus or semi truck than a regular car.
They also mention that fuel taxes are higher for small planes. I would love to know more about that, because that really could smooth things over but there aren’t really any details (also $2400 for [let’s just say] a 150-passenger 737 vs $60 for a private jet may scale similarly per passenger)
Finally, they very briefly bring up how Canada’s system is much better because it uses a factor of weight and distance… Wouldn’t that just mean those giant airliners pay more?!?
Bonus: let’s not kid ourselves into thinking that American Airlines is public transit. It’s still a for-profit corporation and if you lower a plane’s FAA taxes, it’ll directly benefit them.
The fuel rates are currently about $0.22/gallon, and are going up to $1.06/gallon over 5 years, but even that wouldn’t put them on par with commercial flights (they pay 0.6% of the fees, but use 7% of resources, $1.06 divided by $0.22 gets you 4.81x the current 0.6%, which is still 2.9% of the fees, while using 7% of FAA resources.)
So even with the current fuel rate increases, private jets would still be paying less than half of what they end up using.
Damn, that’s something else altogether
like everything in the 70s and 80s, airline deregulation was a stain that never should have happened
And nothing will be fixed while “the left” in the US still worship and lionize Carter, who started all the mess.
Yes, Trump is literally worse, but both parties are two sides of the same coin. You cannot save the country by electing neo-liberals, it’ll always be further right than before.
Trumps in the process of nazi round two and your dumb ass is over here still throwing around both sides same
What the democrats are doing to oppose trump (basically fucking nothing) is the most damning evidence of all, in my opinion. They are controlled opposition.
maybe some, look at who had that lunch in Russia
I’m sure plenty are just old and corrupt(but not Trump directed), schumer doesnt give a ahit about the is long as Israel gets paid
it’s a class war first
The Democrats have proven over the last 50 years that they do not meaningfully oppose Republican values.
It’s time you start engaging with reality with the rest of us.
I’ll agree with the Dems by and large being useless but if you thing there is no difference you are blind
So by your logic, had Harris won the last election we would still be watching the fall of the USA and the rise of a second Nazi wave?
By my logic, if Harris were elected, the vast majority of Americans would see no meaningful positive change. People would get sick of waiting for these policies that will never reach or help them by design, then they elect another Republican out of spite and apathy.
So just the same things that happened with every dem in the last 50 years.
No positive change is surely still significantly better than seeing a massive downturn and an uprising of a second Nazi regime… I don’t get your point.
We’re all gonna die eventually, so should we be advocating for more murderers?
So if the only parties available result in decline, when does a party come along that wants to progress instead of stagnate or regress?
Time to grow up as a society and pull this baindaid off that we have apathetically suffered for our entire lives
Democrats enabled him and did nothing in the gap between his first and second term to prevent him from executing the out in the open takeover plan. They did start genocide and lost the election because they ran campaign on “the most lethal military” instead of stopping the genocide, and your dumb ass still think the Democrats are you friends.
u huh
when they are dragging our asses to the camps better tell all our fellow prisoners so they can tell moral you are
I’m sure you’re really worried about being dragged to camp. Meanwhile I actually have family in ICE detention, and I lay the blame on both the fascists in charge and the idiots who still insist we should have voted for a nonviable genocidal candidate running a platform of most lethal military.
you have family in ice detention and you are worrying about democrats atm?
you are either fake or hopeless either way just wtf
The Democrat started the genocide of my people and doubled down on it. They aren’t my friends, and one day they’ll come for you too.
My family is only in this country because of neoliberals destroying and stealing our homelands.
And no, I’m not worrying about them, I’m just crystal clear they won’t save this country.
i actually was on wikipedia looking up an article on eastern airlines (i was watching ernest saves christmas and old things make me go down wikipedia rabbit holes) and was shocked it started in the 70s under him
Jesus Christ america
