Taxing Short, Cheap Flights Makes a Lot of Sense | Hacker News Reader

Taxing Short, Cheap Flights Makes a Lot of Sense

bloomberg.com

30 pointshoward94129 comments

Why would one levy a tax on flights if one's goal is make travel more efficient? Why not simply tax transportation fuel based on energy or carbon content? The latter would incentivize industry to develop more efficient modes of transportation.

The article mentions that taxing fuel was found to be legally problematic.

One assumes the laws preventing taxing fuels were lobbied for by oil companies.

I looked at the linked report and it seemed to just assume that, did not even make it explicit, and definitely didn't explain it :(. I then searched for airline fuel tax information on Google and found a page from the FAA about existing fuel taxes and some information on how the funds are restricted, so I am left not understand why this is not an option.

https://www.faa.gov/airports/airport_compliance/aviation_fue...

Why would one assume that specifically? Also, wouldn't one then assume they will lobby against the tax on shorter and cheaper flights as well, if it had a similar effect on their numbers?

The basic issue in Europe is that train and bus travel is insanely expensive relative to air travel. That's why Ryanairs of the world even exist and are able to offer fares comparable to bus and train.

If governments are serious about making travel less environmentally stressful, they should consider underwriting rail infrastructure investment and just have the companies recoup operational expenses from fares.

Even more expensive full-service carriers are sometimes less expensive and rarely more expensive than (in particular) high-speed train services. To make intercity trains worth it I typically have to buy the ticket well in advance when cheaper fares are available and I assume the flight prices won't decrease significantly due to their unpredictability.

Ryanair exist because it bribes local politicians, dodges employment and compensation regulations, taxes local hospitality, receives massive, subsidies and is allowed to con its passagiers.

Yes. It keeps the unwashed masses from traveling, and is no problem at all for the rich.

How about we charge flights based on net worth, so they're proportionally expensive?

One way for this is for each flight to contribute X% tax points and increase your income and property taxes...

I have no problem with letting the rich fly as long as they pay. Just use that money to let the poor access eco-friendly transportation more easily.

Here is the problem: a short flight may cost $50, the bus is $40 for the same trip, it is less desirable but much greener. In that situation, people with a $50+ budget will take the plane, people with a $50-$40 budget will take the bus and the others will stay at home. Now bump the plane ticket to $100 and use the money to subsidize the bus down to $30. The result may inconvenience the $50-$100 class as they are now taking the bus but it will open travel for the $30-$40 class, and help the planet at the same time.

It is even better when we take high speed trains into account. The train is often faster and more comfortable overall than the plane on short distances, and cleaner. But it is also often more expensive. Bumping the price of plane tickets and use a bit of that money to help the train will put things back the way they should.

The flight is only cheaper because of the massive subsidies the airlines receive.

What subsidies do airlines receive?

Linked is a starter article with a detailed example:

Custormer pays €81.65 State pays €86.24 in subsidies, €43 in state debt and a trade war

and then we didn't even begin to price in the negative externalities, where airports and planes cause not just huge environmental but also severe health impacts, and the economic value destruction of land near airfields.

https://www.transportenvironment.org/news/cheap-airline-tick...

Disincentivizing short haul flights where less carbon intensive transport options exist is good policy, even if it disproportionately impacts the “unwashed masses” (which seems likely based on income and wealth distribution?). Physical systems don’t really take into account interpretations of fairness and inequality.

No, but we do, so not reason to disincentivize them across the board, not just for the unwashed masses...

We do not price other goods and services this way. Your proposal seems more fitting for fines. For pricing in negative externalities taxation is a good instrument, and an outright ban even better.

In software engineering, there is something called separation of concerns, and you should look at taxes in the same way.

It is not the concern of VAT, tobacco tax, fuel tax, alcohol tax or salt tax to do redistribution. Instead, we must consider the redistribution of the tax system in general.

Taxing all flights, or even better emissions in general, and redistributing taxes for social programmes, gives exactly the distribution effect you want without having to complicate income and property tax regulations.

>Taxing all flights, or even better emissions in general, and redistributing taxes for social programmes, gives exactly the distribution effect you want without having to complicate income and property tax regulations.

I'm not sure I get the counter-argument. A flat tax on the flights themselves, that's not connected to the persons wealth/income doesn't have the distribution effect I want at all.

I want to distribute discouragement, i.e. everybody to be equally discouraged from taking a flight regardless of their income level. A 500% tax on a flight's price from $300 to $1500 makes it extremely difficult for a working/middle class person to fly, but it's negligible peanuts for someone making $1M/year or has 10M in the bank.

And of course we can still redistribute those taxes for social programmes (and there would be more of them too! $500 in taxes when Joe Average flies, and $50000 when Marc Cuban flies, for example, or e.g. $1M each time they fly their private jet (proportional to pollution per person)).

Of course, for the environment, it's enough that we discourage the small guys (who are more numerous) from flying.

But for social justice, it's better to make it more painful for every person to fly, regardless of their income level. A rich person should have an equally large penalty, and what's equal is not the same nominal amount, but the same ratio.

(Even so, it would still be more painful for the working/middle class people -- since more of their income goes towards necessities, where a rich person can just use assets he has lying around, but at least it's better than a flat flight tax).

And it's not something unprecedented: I've read that some countries fine people with expensive cars more for speeding than average cars, which makes sense too.

My argument was that we should separate the distribution aspects of the tax system from the revenue-generating aspects.

> I want to distribute discouragement, i.e. everybody to be equally discouraged from taking a flight regardless of their income level.

You could say the same thing about any other tax, such as tobacco tax. Why do we not levy the tobacco tax in proportion to income?

> But for social justice, it's better to make it more painful for every person to fly, regardless of their income level. A rich person should have an equally large penalty, and what's equal is not the same nominal amount, but the same ratio.

In relation to income levels, almost everything is cheaper when you are rich, and the way we deal with it is to redistribute income to level the playing field for everything, not just flights.

This makes no sense at all. A rich person flying doesn't do more damage than a poor person flying. And income and wealth aren't randomly assigned, people make choices about their career, saving and spending as a fundamental aspect of living in a free society.

Your proposal is just an incredibly naive implementation of complete socialism. It's the same effect as saying janitors and surgeons get paid identically like every 12 year old dreaming up communism comes up with, only in your scenario the surgeon still gets 10x the salary on paper but then also has to pay 10x to buy the same thing.

We need to make externalities like global warming and pollution be priced into things instead of passed onto society at large. We don't need to eat the rich to accomplish that.

Doing this in the US will lower the amount of flights to rural areas

Those flights are already very heavily subsidized, I doubt they wouldn‘t provide even more subsidy if this was done

And while we're at it, why not have a nation wide $0.25/gal tax on auto gas that directly cross subsidizes buyers of electric cars? Kill two birds with one stone.

Short haul flights are the ones which are most likely to electrify first, helping fund the technology for further ranges. Taxing the fuel makes sense.

There’s already an electrified mode of transport for these short trips: the train.

$20.4B and rising... for connecting just two metros in California.

What is the cost of equivalent capacity construction on I-5, at SFO and at LAX?

In some markets (NE Corridor) airspace is so busy that you can‘t even really slot too many more planes in to meet travel demand.

Trying to engineer society doesn't make any sense, much less by levying discriminatory taxes.

Where is the divide for you between governing and engineering society? I assume this answer varies among people as it frames the same situation in two differently opinionated ways.

Unless you want an absolute anarcho capitalist race to the bottom, a non captured regulator that tries to price in at least a fraction of the externalities is an absolute requirement.

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