What you most likely already know:

• The airline industry makes billions in profits.
• Airlines pay millions to the CEO’s and executives that run them.
• Airlines pay millions to politicians.
• Taxpayers pay additional taxes on top of each plane ticket they purchase.

What you most likely don’t know:

• Taxpayers subsidize the Airline Industry:
  • Taxpayers pay for Air Traffic Control Towers
  • Taxpayers subsidize airports and airport maintenance
  • Taxpayers subsidize air travel to non-profitable rural communities nationwide
  • Taxpayers pay for airport security
  • Taxpayers pay for some airport management

Tax
: a charge of money imposed by authority onto private citizens for public purposes

I hear a lot of complaints about welfare but I don’t hear any complaints about subsidy welfare, which is in fact, welfare for corporations and the rich. In a free market society, companies should provide services per consumer demand that are profitable via open competition.

Government Welfare
: a sum of money granted to aid individuals in need with public funds

Government Subsidy
: a sum of money granted to aid private enterprise with public funds

Let’s review:

• The Airlines receive welfare via our taxes to provide a service that they charge us for.
• People who do not fly pay taxes to support those who do.
• Locations, where few people go, are (at times) paying lower fairs than people in high demand areas.
• Executives get rich off hard working tax paying middle-class citizens living check to check.

Let’s also revisit this fact, “Taxpayers subsidize air travel to non-profitable rural communities nationwide“

This means that out of the way locations, with limited passenger travel, are kept at a low cost by dumping the expense on high traffic areas with lots of passengers to flip the bill.

Most middle class people can’t afford to live in those remote locations due to housing cost, commute and so on.

This is not what a free market was designed for:

Free Market
: a system in which prices are determined by competition via private enterprise for in demand services

• At the end of the day we don’t get any money paid back for our investment.
• We don’t get a vote on how to run the airports.
• We don’t get a better experience on the plane.

Oh… and on top of all that… Taxpayers paid for the full bailout of the air industry and the rich are about to ask us to do it again due to Covid.

Why is it ok for the rich to get welfare but shameful for the poor to get it?