Economists like to say that high prices are "sticky." When prices fluctuate they tend to come down more slowly than they went up. Nothing illustrates this more than the current price of aviation fuel. Adjusted for inflation, automotive gas prices have not been lower in decades. But we are slower to see those decreases when we go to fill our wing tanks with avgas.
For bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., taxes are sticky. You can defeat proposals for new taxes, but the bureaucrats will keep trying. Perhaps this explains why the Clinton administration is once again asking Congress for FAA user fees despite AOPA's success in quashing them four times in as many years. How many times must they hear the simple word no?
The Clinton administration's budget request sent to Congress on February 1 proposes charging aviation users $7 billion in new user fees over five years, starting this October. Next fiscal year, almost $1.5 billion in fees would be charged. There is no mention in the budget of how these fees would be assessed; therefore, we have to assume that they would be levied on general aviation and the airlines (in other words, airline passengers). The budget also proposes converting the aviation excise taxes that we now pay, including the fuel tax on avgas, to user fees.
The money generated by the user fees isn't intended to pay for vital unfunded aviation needs like airport improvements or modernizing the air traffic control system. The government doesn't need more of our money to fund aviation. AOPA dispelled that myth long ago, and the FAA finally acknowledged it. The famous $12 billion "funding gap" that the previous FAA administrator warned of never materialized. Congress has always funded the agency comfortably. The FAA still has room to save moneywith the personnel and procurement reforms that AOPA helped to enact in 1996. And the Airport and Airway Trust Fund is building a surplus again. What is amazing is that according to the new Clinton budget proposal, an $8.2 billion trust fund surplus would sit in the treasury after we start paying these proposed new user fees. This begs the question, "Then why new taxes?"
The administration wants to charge us user fees so that it can pay for other pet political projects without busting the budget. According to the Senate Budget Committee, FAA user fees are part of a slate of new taxes and fees sprinkled through the president's budget, designed to finance $129 billion in nonaviation spending increases over the next five years. As the committee puts it: "The administration has not told supporters of the programs slated for increases in the president's budget about the 'pay-fors.'" Pilots are one of the "pay-fors" because we would pay for new spending on nonaviation programs.
The administration is operating under the strict spending cap agreed to by Congress in 1997, which led to a balanced federal budget last year for the first time since 1969. The cap gets tighter by $30 billion for the next fiscal year, and the White House is trying to find a way to fund its laundry list of new programs — which must fall within the confines of the reduced spending cap. Funding the FAA with user fees would have the financial effect of taking the agency's budget out from under the spending cap, freeing the administration to spend elsewhere.
To rub salt in our wounds, this budget would cut Airport Improvement Program funds from the current $1.95 billion to $1.6 billion, a drastic 18-percent drop.
User fees are nothing more than a backdoor tax increase. They are not intended to meet our nation's aviation needs; they exist to shift the burden of other new social programs to the backs of pilots. Rest assured that AOPA will work hard to keep the Clinton administration from claiming that these fees are anything else. I have personally made several visits to key politicians on Capitol Hill since the budget was announced, and I have scheduled many more. To hit home the real meaning of these new "fees," I have found that your elected officials understand the old line, "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck." User fees are taxes, plain and simple.
As I mentioned, AOPA has defeated user fee proposals four times during this administration. But every budget year starts from scratch, and we have to fight this battle all over again. Fortunately, things are a little different this year — this is the "Year of Aviation" as proclaimed by Rep. Bud Shuster (R-Pa.).
As chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Rep. Shuster is working this year to assure that the money we pay into the Airport and Airway Trust Fund is spent promptly for aviation purposes. As even the administration agrees, there is plenty of money available in the trust fund — but remember the spending cap? Spending from the aviation trust fund is subject to the cap, making it difficult to use when it is needed. Rep. Shuster's solution is to give spending from the trust fund special treatment in the budget process becausethe money comes directly from aviation users. He succeeded in getting similar treatment for the Highway Trust Fund last year, and his aviation initiative enjoys bipartisan support this year.
The answer to the FAA's management woes is to makethe FAA an independent agency, free from the meddling of the Department of Transportation. And the answer to the nation's vital air transportation investment needs is not to saddle aviators with the burden of paying for other budget priorities while cutting aviation infrastructure spending. The answer is to spend the money in the aviation trust fund — our money — for its intended purpose.
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