Reflections on your family's recent travel experience

Every time you buy a ticket for a bus, train or a plane, every time you buy gasoline for your car, a portion of your payment goes to the federal government. Why? Because roads need to be maintained, safety standards have to be created, studied and maintained, and, never least, collective safety is not something that can be parceled out to the individual. Democracy rules (it is in the Constitution).

So, when you get on that plane, you are not allowed to come prepared, armed with Mace or perhaps a Taser, in case there is a terrorist threat aboard any more than you are allowed to seize control of the pilot’s wheel to fly around a cloud you find threatening. Trained experts are put in charge to secure your safety. It is part of the fee you pay and the condition of your bottom on that seat agreement you undertook when you used your credit card.

Safety used to be a prerogative, an imperative, of government. Now it is a growing business. Ever since Congress decided in the 1980s to tax your plane fare a paltry extra $8 for “safety improvements to airport infrastructure� the floodgates on taxation have been thrown wide open.

Events like 9/11 simply allowed rhetoric to speed the process for hidden taxes, commercial safety funding, federal employee hiring in the hundreds of thousands, useless scanning machines, long lines for passengers and that staple of protectionism gone haywire — a really fat bill handed to you, the consumer, as a federal add-on. This add-on is a serious disincentive to commerce and real national security.

Let us take a fare for an American traveling to Europe roundtrip. Cost? $1,500. Then add on the “taxes, fees and security charges and surcharges� of $530. Total cost? $2,030 of which about $1 in four goes to the government.

And we all know how good the TSA and the government are at screening. If you take the 770 million air passengers inside or coming to the United States last year, that is one heck of a bill. No federal agency will admit how much they have collected in 2010, but most industry analysts say it is more than $130 billion, with a “B.� Heck of a good revenue source for national security, heck of a good jobs program, heck of a lot of damage to Americans’ ability to travel affordably.

And if you break down those numbers, you find that 75 percent of the tariffs paid were for low-fare-paying customers. In short, it is a hidden tax for the middle class, again.

It does not do the airlines much good, either, as they only made 10 percent profit last year (name me any middle-class family that made 10 percent profit last year — that is 10 percent savings to you and me).

Someone with a powerful lobby (voice) in Washington has to redress this problem.

Years ago, TWA lost my luggage at Kennedy Airport. I complained. They blamed the airport staff, the baggage handlers, the weather, whatever. I pointed out that my ticket says I paid them. My luggage stubs proved TWA was given the responsibility of my bags. Therefore, TWA was responsible and I did not give a darn who they wanted to blame, I was blaming them.

As I said this in a crowded terminal in a very loud voice, I got a round of applause from about 500 passengers. TWA scrambled and, sure enough, found my bags 20 minutes later.

I suggest it is time we stopped allowing the airlines to send us a divided bill clearly showing how much “taxes, fees and security charges and surcharges� we are paying to the government as if it were not their problem and start blaming them or at least forcing them to speak up and protect their paying passengers for this gouging. After all, we do not pay the feds, we pay the airline; our credit card says so. I blame the airlines. Let’s start a revolt and force them to get this hidden tax taken off the backs of the flying public. Or was that the secret deal when the taxpayers bailed them all out in 2001-02?

Oh, and in case you think this is a one-off, think again. Already you are being asked to contribute to offset the carbon emissions of the plane you paid your seat on to the (currently low) tune of $25 for every $1,000 you spend. This is early cap-and-trade pollution policy taxation — another business we’re being asked to finance in the name of security. Like “taxes, fees and security charges and surcharges,� this is a business set to grow, big and fast. Want to stop pollution? Stop pollution, de-pollute and don’t turn it into a business.

Want to stop travel insecurity? Fix terrorism; do not turn it into a business soaking the traveling public.

Peter Riva, formerly of Amenia Union, lives in New Mexico.

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