Congratulations are in order for the Senate of the United States. The Senate adjourned Friday without passing a bill to continue funding for the Federal Aviation Administration. As a result, the FAA has shut down and furloughed a large number of employees. The taxes on air travel that fund the FAA also expired with the failure to pass the bill, so the government is losing about 200 million dollars a week in revenue.
Why, you may ask, did the Senate throw in the towel? It seems that the big issue is that the House, in passing a bill to fund the FAA, cut about 16 million dollars in expenditures over the next year to subsidize air travel to 13 rural communities in 10 states. To put this into context, remember that the suspended taxes that support the FAA amount to about 200 million dollars per week or about ten and a half billion dollars per year. The cut made by the House comes to a cut of about one tenth of one percent of that amount. If the Democrats in the Senate cannot accept a spending cut of 0.1% in the FAA budget, how will they ever cut spending in the rest of the budget?
The truth is that the Senate Democrats have acted here in a most irresponsible manner. Instead of accepting cuts for 13 little used airports, the entire FAA system is now shut down and thousands are out of work.
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