A FRACTURE AMONG THE ENVIRONMENTALIST WACKOS.

There's nothing quite like the Davos set conferring on ways to make the lives of Normals worse after having clogged the airport with their private jets to make Militant Normals cantankerous.

Common Dreams, day after day, is full of schemes to make the lives of Normals worse.  There are limits, though, to their willingness to carry water for the Great Reset.

Research published Monday details how the working class is paying the price, in more ways than one, for the "jet-owning oligarchy" to hop around the globe in their personal luxury planes.

It's well-established that private jet travel by the super-rich is worsening the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis. Adding insult to injury, this conspicuously carbon-intensive consumption is being subsidized by ordinary taxpayers, as the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and Patriotic Millionaires make clear in their new analysis.

It being Common Dreams, they view with alarm evidence of a growing cohort of people with the means to buy private jets, which might be evidence of the middle class vanishing upward.

"The private jet sector set industry records with regards to transaction and dollar volume in 2021 and 2022."

While a coronavirus-era boom is evident, the industry has been growing steadily alongside wealth inequality since the turn of the century. As the report states: "The size of the global fleet has increased 133% in the last two decades from 9,895 in 2000 to 23,133 in mid-2022. This bonanza was accompanied by an unprecedented number of business jet operations, 5.3 million in 2022."

According to the report, "The median net worth of a full and fractional private jet owner is $190 million and $140 million respectively." A minuscule 0.0008% of the global population belongs to the jet-owning class, which consists mostly of financial and real estate tycoons.

That's quite the price of admission to avoid being subjected to the cattle-car conditions on commercial airlines, isn't it? But I digress.  Let us credit Kenny Stancil with alluding to rent-seeking.

"Private flyers pay just 2% of the taxes that primarily fund the Federal Aviation Administration, yet nearly 17% of flights handled by the FAA are private," said [Institute for Policy Studies analyst Kalena] Thomhave. "Meanwhile, private jets contribute disproportionately to carbon emissions while often representing significant tax savings for their wealthy owners."

As the report observes: "Thousands of municipal airports in the U.S. are funded by the public, but many primarily serve private and corporate jets. These airports may not offer scheduled passenger service, but they still offer airport runways subsidized by taxes."

Such regressive taxation is the product of industry lobbying.

Maybe treating the airports and airways as productive assets and pricing them accordingly will be a first step toward finding the value proposition in those roads, streets, and municipal parking lots.  Among Common Dreams types, though, their first, possibly last, and most likely only instinct is to punitively tax productive people.

Report co-author Omar Ocampo, a researcher with the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at IPS, said that the private jet industry's expected growth this decade "provides us with a great opportunity to levy a luxury transfer tax on private jet sales." He added that "the revenue raised from this tax can be invested towards developing a green transportation system."

According to the report, "A 10% and 5% transfer fee on pre-owned and new private aircraft would have raised $2.4 billion in 2021 and $2.6 billion in 2022."

Let's see, the government is borrowing trillions of dollars, and transfer taxes and luxury taxes raise a billion here or a billion there, not quite the real money it once was.  Moreover, those taxes provide incentives to maintain those existing airplanes or defer the purchase of new ones.  But then it was Washington politicians who thought punitive sales taxes on luxury yachts would raise a lot of money, toward the end of the past century, and all that did was kill boat building jobs along the coasts.  And in Canada.