Posted on 12/17/2013 4:09:49 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
He is the new tax collector for the welfare state. And House Speaker John Boehners latest gift to the American people a 124% tax increase on air travel can aptly be called The Air Boehner Tax.
But first a short time travel trip.
The date: Monday. January 11, 1982
The place: The White House
Wrote President Ronald Reagan in his diary of this day:
Repub. House Leaders came down to the W.H. Except for Jack Kemp they are hl bent on new taxes
Another date: Wednesday, August 4, 1982
The place: The White House.
Another entry from Reagans diary:
Met with Jack Kemp (alone) & then in leadership meeting. He is adamant that we are wrong on the tax increase. He is in fact unreasonable. The tax increase is the price we pay to get the budget cuts.
Kemp could not have disagreed more, and this episode from 1982 is worth recalling as Speaker Boehner and Congressman Paul Ryan go about the business of selling the Ryan-Murray budget deal.
A budget deal that specifically imposes a 124% tax increase on air travelers, as noted in the Daily Caller.
As Reagan correctly recorded at the time, Congressman Jack Kemp, the leading proponent of the tax cuts that were the foundation of the job-creating machine that was famously scorned by Democrats as Reaganomics furiously opposed the tax increase that was pushed not only by congressional Democrats but, tellingly, the House and Senate Republican leadership as well. Specifically then-Senate Finance Committee chairman, Kansas GOP Senator Bob Dole.....
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
1. I agree with you 100%.
2. If we're going to have the Federal government stop spending, then let's start by eliminating the FAA and turning the responsibility for its operations over to the airlines. Do you think the airline industry would be OK with that?
This is why Federal regulation of interstate travel -- which is clearly established in the U.S. Constitution -- is a necessity in a nation that is engaged in anything more than subsistence agriculture.
Sorry, my comment wasn’t directed directly at the airline fees. I was commenting on a sentence in the article about the GOP in general trying to move away from general tax revenue into industry-specific taxes. And yes, you pay for your ticket in the city you fly out of, so that’s where your tax-basis is. But really, should a state even be charging a fee for airline travel? Doesn’t sales tax already cover that?
However, if you are justifying this fee based on interstate-ness, How do you justify the fee on a flight from Dallas to Houston? Columbia to St. Louis? Those are fully within a single state, so how would the Fed have any jurisdiction there?
But how is this not an area where states have say-so? they control their direct airspace, this isn’t exactly interstate commerce (where the only role the Feds should have there is ensuring all states are equal to each other in terms of cross-border), and really, like you said in another post, the airlines/airport owners should be controlling their own airports, not the Fed.
It's hard to separate "interstate" from "intrastate" in an area like air travel because it's not as if the intrastate flights always operate out of different airports, with different air traffic control systems, or with different types of aircraft. In some cases they may actually do this, but I'm not sure there would be any major Federal oversight for small airports anyway -- even for flights that cross state lines.
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