Agree 100% with you.
I've been saying it for years: taxes on air travel aren't so much extra bonus taxes extracted from customers, they're taxes on airlines. Customers are willing to pay X for air travel and it doesn't matter how much of that X is made up of taxes on their tickets. The events of the past couple of weeks illustrates this principle perfectly as the media squawked about evil airlines "raising fares" because of the tax holiday. And of course the fares will have to come down now that the taxes are being collected again - if they stayed at the new higher levels, quantity demanded (number of tickets sold) would plummet. So after a two-week tax holiday, AA and its peers are once again being taxed at outrageous levels - taking the money out of your family's paychecks and budgets.
The federal ticket excise taxes, segment taxes, airport PFCs and September 11 Security Fees are a primary reason that airlines have not been profitable for most of the past decade. If all of those taxes were canceled today, base fares would increase to the total all-in prices of today and airlines would take in billions more revenue per year than they currently do. Losses would become profits and restore and more wouldn't be just a wet dream.
The media were saying that the federal excise taxes plus the segment taxes not collected were costing the feds about $30 million per day. That's over $10 billion per year. AA's share of that is easily $2 billion per year; that's $16 billion collected by AA but not belonging to AA over the past eight years. Sure, fuel costs have been a problem, but if AA (and other airlines) weren't taxed to death, airline employees wouldn't have been punished quite as severely as they have been.
Well they increased fares what, seven times this year, in conjunction with oil price increases? Bookings didnt plummett despite the fact that everyone would have less disposable income as a result of the oil increase. Guess what the planes are still jamed packed. Much as they have been through every real or imagined crises for the last couple of years.
I agree that the passengers dont care whether the money goes to taxes or the carrier, they dont care whether it goes to the oil companies either and increase after increase they still keep coming.
The fact is they dont know how much they can raise the fares till they do it.
Its not the taxes, which have been there all along, its mainly the greed of oil companies thats causing the problem. Taxes go to the runways, ATC, and directly back into the community, oil revenues go to the oil companies.
For years you have cited how much of a burden the 300% increase in the price of fuel is, now all of a sudden its the Taxes? Come on, get real. $2 billion out of $20 billion in Revenue, even if that figure was coming out of what the passengers are willing to pay, thus from the carrier, thats only 10%, who is being taxed to death here?
To all my coworkers out there, lets say the government cut the Airlines taxes (then raised our taxes to make up for the shortfall) do you think the company would share it with us?
