Senators still demand user fees

On Fri, 13 Jul 2007 11:31:48 -0500, Neil Gould wrote:

Both parties
are warped beyond any practical use as far as tackling the most pertinent
issues of our time.

They exist only to continue to exist.

- Andrew

"kontiki" wrote in message
...
The United States Senate is a disgrace. The vast majority of
them are career politicians... old _farts_ that haven't ever
held a real job in their life.

It's disgusting that such a once great country is so often
held hostage by this treasonous bunch of wothrless blowhards.
They should be all terminated. Lets get some qualified honets
Americans in there make some good statesman-like decisions
for a change.

You mean people who agree with you?

"Jay Honeck" wrote in message
ups.com...
Don't you find it at least curious that the straight-talking, honest
politicians are those considered non-contenders for higher office?

I'm trying to remember the last straight-talker in the Presidency.
Was it:

Kennedy? Nope
Johnson? Nope
Nixon? Nope
Ford? Yep - but he was appointed.
Carter? Yep -- but no one liked what he said.
Reagan? Yep -- but only if it was good news.
Bush I? Yep -- but booted after one term.
Clinton? Nope
Bush II? Yep -- but no one likes what he says.
Bush II a straight talker - who the hell understands what he is saying - he
is incomprehensible.

Jay Honeck wrote:
I'm trying to remember the last straight-talker in the Presidency.

William Henry Harrison!

"Neil Gould" wrote:

they presume that we are too stupid to see through their ploys.

Alas, they must presume correctly WRT the majority of "us," otherwise the
current sorry crowd would not be in office.

--
Dan

"How can an idiot be a policeman? Answer me that!"
-Chief Inspector Dreyfus

On Fri, 13 Jul 2007 09:33:04 -0700, Matt Barrow wrote:

You don't think those links are written by someone with a vested
interest or bias of some sort?

What in\terest would that be?

I've no idea. I don't care enough to learn. Willful distortion, though,
makes it clear that there's something motivating the authors away from
truth.


Why else would the first article start with citing the problem of
congested airports but call that an ATC issue? That's misdirection;
simple literary dishonesty.

Maybe the fact there's no fees for landing during peak timeslots has
something to do with that? Maybe if you dig a bit you find that's a mjor
tenent of his proposal?

That's fine. And if he were to use that argument to push for something
like congestion pricing for landing slots, I'd have no problem with the
logic. That's not where that paper took the reasoning, however.


The second simply says essentially "there's evidence that we're right"
w/o citing any.

Could you poin that one out?

Point out a lack of citation?

But I should have been more precise: I was referring specifically to the
claim that the lack of funding is an obstacle to ATC upgrading. The
closest thing to a citation is the claim that Blakey and Mineta have
claimed that the FAA's funding base has been "devastated". Evidence from
testimony suggests otherwise.


The third speaks to a funding problem. Yet the GAO disagrees,
according to testimony by Gerald Dillingham. Calvin Scovel of the DOT
agrees with that testimony.

[...]

It's worth reading GAO-06-1114T itself. For example, I note on page 12
that the FAA is apparently ignoring the fact that - regardless of the
services GA receives from the ATC system - the system as it exists today
exists because of commercial aviation. Did commercial aviation not exist,
the cost of GA's consumed services would be quite a bit lower.

It's easy to distort the truth as the FAA is apparently doing, simply by
speaking of that "cost of services received". It's quite similar, in
fact, to a game being played out in my local township. To fudge some
numbers, the town is pushing some services (ie. parking and sewage) onto
separate agencies. The agencies hire additional people (that weren't
needed when the town provided these services directly), and then call
these hires "costs of running the agency" that get passed on to the users.

Perhaps there are spreadsheets that can justify the cost given that the
agencies exist, but the agencies were imposed upon the users. It was a
constituent other than the users that caused this addition cost, even
those the users are getting parking and sewage services.

Put another way, the users could (and did) get those same services at
lower cost but for the decisions made for someone else's benefit. Why
should the users shoulder the additional cost?

The report does touch upon this issue again - not merely citing FAA
claims, but actually pointing them out - on pages 14 and 15.

Another issue raised by this report is equity. An example cited is that
a 767 flight contributes more than a 737 flight. From the FAA's
perspective, I see the issue. But ATC service cost is just one possible
metric for a given flight. Another is the value provided by that flight.
Assuming that there's some value in getting a person from point A to point
B, then that 767 flight does contribute more value as well. A VAT on that
value would yield more than on a 737 flight.

On a lighter note (at least I hope the authors saw the humor here; I sure
do), page 16 speaks to the "problem" that a fuel tax might encourage fuel
efficiency.

All that said, there's something I've missed. Where in that report is the
claim that the FAA will be underfunded by the current system of fuel taxes?

What that ignores is structural
changes in air transportation, discussed in last fall's GAO report on
the same subject (its) and in FAA's justification for its funding reform
proposal. A fundamental disconnect exists between the drivers of
aviation tax revenue (the number of passengers carried and the average
ticket price) and the ATC system's annual cost (driven by workload,
based on the growth in air traffic). As the same total number of people
gets carried in more, smaller units (RJs instead of 737s, air taxis and
fractionals instead of airliners, etc.), traffic grows faster than
passengers, and therefore costs grow faster than revenue. It is this
structural disconnect that threatens the ability to afford NextGen.

This ignores numerous issues, and the cited GAO report makes nothing like
this strong a claim. For example, air taxis are likely to avoid the
terminal areas most congested. The same is true, albeit presumably to a
reduced degree, for any increase in RJ traffic. This pushes traffic from
the more congested areas to the less congested areas.

[...]

More, the fact that the airlines are apparently able to exploit this
process to try to achieve yet another tax break (despite the claimed
issue being an FAA cash shortfall) makes it clear that the process is
biased and therefore flawed (and pretty much congressional business as
usual).

It's the airlines funding model that he explicitly rejects.

I'm not sure what you mean. Did you mean "airlines' funding..."? And to
which "he" are you referring? The author of those four papers? Or one of
the Senators from the origins of this thread.

The latter is to what I was referring in my paragraph above. The process
in the Senate we're witnessing is corrupted (though in the fashion to
which we've become accustomed). That paragraph wasn't addressing those
four papers, but the process which threatens to impose these fees upon us
[merely because some Senator has a donation up his ... wallet].

- Andrew

"Jim Logajan" wrote in message
.. .
Jay Honeck wrote:
I'm trying to remember the last straight-talker in the Presidency.

William Henry Harrison!

No, Calvin Coolidge. He never said much, though.

"Andrew Gideon" wrote in message
news
On Fri, 13 Jul 2007 09:33:04 -0700, Matt Barrow wrote:

You don't think those links are written by someone with a vested
interest or bias of some sort?

What in\terest would that be?

I've no idea. I don't care enough to learn.

Nuff' said.

Willful distortion, though,
makes it clear that there's something motivating the authors away from
truth.

Bye.

Enjoy being grounded in a few years.

[Over and out]

S Green wrote:
"kontiki" wrote in message
...

The United States Senate is a disgrace. The vast majority of
them are career politicians... old _farts_ that haven't ever
held a real job in their life.

It's disgusting that such a once great country is so often
held hostage by this treasonous bunch of wothrless blowhards.
They should be all terminated. Lets get some qualified honets
Americans in there make some good statesman-like decisions
for a change.


You mean people who agree with you?


Well Senator Kerry, I didn't realize that you read these
newsgroups (after all, its all a bunch of peons well below
your stature as a great senator, right?) but since you asked...
as a matter of fact yes.

Get a job.

Matt Barrow wrote:
links
It's certainly more fun, though, to listen to all the alphabet groups with a
vested interest.

I read the articles, and here's what I could glean from them:

Modernization has three issues:

1. No one will give us the money to do it.
2. The FAA isn't the giant, faceless soul-eating bureaucratic monster we
thought it was.
3. No one wants our system.

That said, the ideas about delays and system capacity were interesting.
They seem to predict a nearly quadratic expansion of delay times if we
throw in just a few more planes.

The proposals need about 16 hours a year in time savings for the light
category jets to break even, of approx. 450 hours a year. That equates
to about 2.5 minutes of time savings per day. We could achieve this kind
of time saving by simply whipping the controllers vigorously until they
begin to issue clearances faster, or perhaps just at a faster vocal clip.

The 'best-case' solution (Dist-Wt, as I saw it) means an approximate
doubling of flight costs per year for a corporate operator. What this
proposal fails to factor, I think, is that much of the corporate traffic
is not fundamental, but incidental to business; corporations choose to
own and maintain their own jet because it's convenient and
cost-effective over the airlines. What kinds of contingencies are
planned when corporate traffic drops to practically nothing, and the
airlines are sitting fat and happy on their tax-less fuel?

This proposal would seem to advocate throwing wads of cash at a problem
that doesn't yet exist, while simultaneously making it nearly impossible
for an individual or entity to own or operate a private aircraft. Is the
solution to the problem of capacity simply to make all the pilots
carpool, or trust a subsidized government pocket-boy to take up the
slack? Is the solution simply to drive private citizens back to the
airlines by making GA impossible to support?

The "let's be like Canada et al." argument is used for another popular
hot-button topic: NHS. There's a reason why "if it works for them, it'll
work for us" doesn't ring true to many people: it's a crap way of doing
things. Even in spite of ourselves, practically no-one in the US doesn't
have some kind of access to health insurance, and we maintain one of the
world's best healthcare systems anyway, without yet another public
private oversight sub-committee on the Committee for Sub-Oversight of
Administration. Now, why did we want to use a foreign nation's system as
a template, again?

TheSmokingGnu