I think its not as much as they collect the taxes as the reauthorization bill would have set and continued the taxes, so without that bill passing they cant charge the taxes.
Brett is spot on with his assessment. I wondered the same thing that shift6 did and looked it up. As an aside, my next plane ticket will be through Virgin. Nothing personal, Brett ;)
Congress has failed to re-authorize the working budget of the FAA. This means as of Monday, the FAA is running only on a skeleton crew. This implies the FAA has no power to gather taxes. The requirement was that airfare ticket prices could be dropping when this happened. When the power ended, however, airlines hiked their prices. This implies most air travelers won’t see any price drop.
Now Congress has adjourned without passing the FAA extension. The FAA will lose $1.2B in tax revenue, and as we’ve seen those tax savings aren’t being passed along to the consumer.
It’s due to the Republicans attaching a rider that overturns a labor ruling that made it easier for airport workers to unionize. Yes, the Republicans are so anti-union that they are willing to starve the FAA and ultimately cost taxpayers more money. Construction projects have been abandoned but there are still ongoing costs associated with them.
How does that cost us more money? Ticket prices are still lower, overall, aren’t they? A more serious criticism would seem to be that the terrorists will win now because the FAA can’t secure us!
Who do you think is going to make up for the FAA’s shortfall?
There are construction projects all over the country that have been put on hold due to this, and thousands of workers laid off. There are ongoing costs with these construction projects that don’t disappear according to the article.
A lot of the laid off workers will file for unemployment or look for different jobs, and that means there’s the cost of replacing them and the cost of paying their unemployment benefits.
It’s all unnecessary. They could have passed a clean bill but the Republicans insisted on an anti-union rider.
It’s important that we protect businesses and governments from their employees.
Yep, we have a small airport project in our little part of the country that employed a variety of contractors and others, and it is now on hold. The father of a guy that works in my lab had that as the first job he’s had in a while, due to the recession, and he now is saying he’ll likely have to file for unemployment again.
I have no idea how it effects the country overall, but I do see one little piece of impact here.
Thanks for the explanations. I thought you meant in terms of ticket prices. But yeah, the construction costs (going to waste), layoffs, and subsequent unemployment costs will add up. Will they actually be more than the FAA taxes, or will they just be less efficient (since they are basically wasted)?
One thing that should be done is to move weather observers from the FAA to NOAA, and the rest of the FAA functions to the TSA.
Then dump the FAA entirely. That’s one solution. The FAA and TSA seem kinda redundant to me right now.
How about we dump the TSA and move it to the FAA?
FAA handles all sorts of things, the TSA does nothing but put on security shows and grope people.
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