It's not private, it's a company jet. So how to you distinguish this jet from a commercial airliner? The company is smaller than United? The larger jets of United pay the lower tax? So United can no longer own small jets?
This will lead to people buying larger jets, if needed they will buy A220. The effect being that more CO2 is produced. High tax if you don't sell tickets? Then the shell companies will sell tickets for the flights to the people who use the jet and own the shell company.
Or smaller jets get larger tanks and go to Mexico or the Bahamas, then fly back to the US.
Politicians are the worst people in second order thinking. Other explanation is they are populist and don't care if the stuff they do works.
(Will need to read the bill, the article is sparse on facts)
[Edit] Read the bill. It is sparse on implementation, it only says "commercial" has lower taxes, (going back to the 2017 with a hypothetical example) well Hamilton buying a ticket from the Notlimah Ltd. Airline of Panama enables the Notlimah Airline company to pay lower taxes. How is this working? Other people need to be able to buy tickets for the company to be called commercial? His friends buy tickets. Other people beside his friends need to be able to buy (how to enforce this?)? Ok, everyone with a coupon card can buy. Or: The airline changes it's terms of service to everyone with a net income of >$10M/y is allowed to buy a ticket.
Or a ticket costs $1M flight, H. pays N. Airline, then the money gets back to H. to a bank account on the Bahamas.
I really would like to know how to enforce this.
Beside this 1 line of how it should be applied, it has pages and pages on who should get the money, one list
(A) Black
(B) African American
(C) Asia
(D) Pacific Islander
(E) Other non-White race
(F) Hispanic
(G) Latino
(H) Linguistically isolated
(I) Middle Eastern and North African.
and another e.G.
(A) a Federally recognized Indian Tribe
(B) a State-recognized Indian Tribe
(C) an Alaska Native community
(D) a Native Hawaiian community
(E) any other Indigenous community
So very low effort in the bill on how to get the money, a lot of effort in the bill on how to spread the money.
And this is the trick, rich leftist politicians do:
Proposing anti-rich laws that do not hurt their rich friends
at all and being hurrayed by their naive voters, instead of doing things that hurt their rich friends.
I don't think there are many people who fly enough that it's economical for them to buy an A220 in order to save $1.73/gal on jet fuel. (That's the actual proposed change in taxes.)
The title of the article was "Why not tax private jets out of business?" The smallest plane United operates is a "EMB 145" which should be in reach for many of these people (Google search says "$2,395,000" - which is cheaper than many Gulfstreams)
