How you can resist funding the government →
other ways the government is funded →
excise taxes →
air travel tax
Did you know there’s a United States federal excise tax on air travel?
Yes indeed.
There is a 7.5% federal excise tax on the price of an airline ticket.
In addition, for every domestic flight, or leg of a flight, that begins and ends in the United States there is an excise tax ($3.70); for flights that begin or end in Alaska or Hawaii the charge is higher ($8.10); for international flights that begin or end in the United States, the charge is higher still ($16.10).
(There are also excise taxes on airplane fuel.)
As with the federal excise tax on telephone service, the customer is responsible for paying the tax and the company that offers the service is merely supposed to collect it and pass it on to the government.
And as with the telephone tax, if the customer refuses to pay the tax, the company is supposed to report the customer to the government.
War tax resisters have used this set-up to successfully refuse their phone taxes.
They pay their bills, except for the federal excise tax, and then notify the phone company of the law that says the company is supposed to report this refusal to the feds.
This way the company doesn’t just think the customer has underpaid their bill, and doesn’t have grounds to cut off phone service.
I’m unaware of anyone who has successfully tried this same approach with air travel.
Typically the excise taxes are tacked on to the price of the ticket.
Often the purchase is done on-line or through some ticketing agency that is unlikely to believe it has the flexibility to accept any payment less than the number on the screen.
I’d imagine it would take a lot of work to try to resist this tax in this fashion.
This is from a series of pages on sources of federal war spending other than
the federal income tax and strategies that war tax resisters can use to reduce
their support of the government in these areas.
The Excise Tax on Air Travel
Description
There is a 7.5% federal excise tax on the price of an airline ticket. In
addition, for every domestic flight, or leg of a flight, that begins and ends
in the United States there is an excise tax ($3.70); for flights that begin or
end in Alaska or Hawaii the charge is higher ($8.10); for international
flights that begin or end in the United States, the charge is higher still
($16.10). There are also excise taxes on airplane fuel.
Amount of the Tax
As of , these are the federal
excise tax rates on air travel:
there is a 7.5% tax on the ticket price
the tax on the domestic segment of taxable air transportation is $3.70
(unless the flight is to or from a rural airport, in which case there is
no segment-based excise tax)
the tax on international flights that begin or end in the United States is
$16.10 ($16.30 in )
the tax on departures of interstate flights that begin or end in Alaska or
Hawaii is $8.10 ($8.20 in )
These excise taxes are adjusted annually for inflation.
Here is an example from the “form 720” instructions, using 2009’s excise tax
amounts: “In , Frank Jones pays
$265.20 to a commercial airline for a flight in January from Washington to
Chicago with an intermediate stop in Cleveland. The flight comprises two
segments. The price includes the $240 fare and $25.20 excise tax [($240 ×
7.5%) + (2 × $3.60)] for which Frank is liable. The airline collects the tax
from Frank and pays it over to the government.”
There are also excise taxes on the fuel used in air transportation, but these
are covered on another page.
How Much the Government Collects
It is difficult to determine from the government’s accounting just how much it
collects from these various fees, but a
budget report puts it somewhere in the neighborhood of $11 billion.
How This Tax Is Collected
The company receiving the payment for air transportation services must collect
and pay over the tax and file the return.
As with the telephone excise tax, this company is merely supposed to collect
and pass-through the tax, and if a passenger refuses to pay, the company is
supposed to report this to the
IRS at
the same time as the company files its excise tax return. This report must
include the name and address of the tax refuser, the type of service rendered
by the company, the price of the ticket, and the date.
Are the Tax Receipts Earmarked?
Some of the tax is destined for the Airport & Airway Trust Fund, and some
for the general fund.
How Can You Resist This Tax?
Obviously, you can avoid contributing to taxes on air travel by not travelling
by air, using ground transportation instead or staying closer to home.
The law seems to leave open the possibility of refusing to pay the excise tax
at the time of ticket purchase, but we’ve never heard of anyone attempting to
do this, and the usual process for ticket purchasing doesn’t seem to have a
juncture at which a resister can make such a refusal. This is an experiment
that remains to be tried.
Some adorably civic-minded dolts in the United States actually voluntarily
donate money to the government in order to reduce the federal government’s
debt — amounting to a couple of million dollars a year (in the
neighborhood of one one-millionth of the total officially-acknowledged
debt, or one percent of one day’s worth of interest on that
debt). You can find instructions on how to do this in your 1040
instruction booklet, under the title “Gift To Reduce Debt Held by the
Public,” and you’d do this by sending a check to “Bureau of the Public
Debt.” You probably won’t be surprised to learn that
contributions to that fund do not, however, go to pay off the debt,
but are just lumped in with all other contributions to the general fund
to swell the purse that Congress overspends from.
CIA
agents went undercover in Pakistan on a fake vaccination campaign in order
to collect intelligence during their campaign to target Osama Bin Laden.
Tom Scocca explains how this recklessly puts real health workers at risk.
“[T]he single act is a metonym for the total moral collapse of the people
and the system responsible for it… The anonymous official [who justified
the program] was not merely describing the thought processes behind one
immoral, ineffective, and destructive stunt. The same people, thinking the
same way, have been making decisions about life and death — mostly death — all over the world.”
Squabbling in Congress has meant that they have failed to renew
many excise taxes on air travel.
So, temporarily anyway, you can fly in the
U.S. without
paying these taxes (certain other federal taxes still apply).
Fred Reed contemplates disengagement, or “domestic expatriation — the recognition that living in a country makes you a resident, not a subscriber.”
You can write to your long distance provider (or you could, back when people typically had long distance providers instead of general-purpose cell or internet telephony) and say “I’m not paying my federal long distance telephone service excise tax any longer.
Please remove it from my bill and inform the federal government of my intransigence.”
If you do so, the company is supposed to stop charging you and the government is supposed to start persecuting you.
During the Vietnam War, when such excise tax refusal became a popular form of protest, such persecution was practiced, and the government went to great trouble to seize cars and things in order to assert its right to paltry amounts of excise tax.
Since then, they’ve mostly ignored the eccentric tax resisters.
There is a similar excise tax (several overlapping ones, actually) on air travel, and the official rule is the same — if the passenger says he or she is not paying, the ticketing agency is supposed to notify the government of their refusal.
In practice, though, most people buy their airline tickets through web sites, and there is no point in the process at which they can say “no” to such excise taxes.
This was not always the case, as this Associated Press dispatch from concerning a Philadelphia-specific air travel excise tax shows:
Washington (AP) —
Newly devised taxes on air passengers went into effect over the weekend at five airports, but thousands of travelers refused to pay the new fees.
The collection of the new municipal head taxes, and the requirement that holdout passengers fill out refusal forms, resulted in massive delays at the major airport involved, Philadelphia.
The City of Brotherly Love has imposed the stiffest charge of any yet levied or proposed — $2 per person for all air travelers arriving at the airport as well as for all of those departing.
There was less difficulty initially at the other airports with lighter traffic and with a more modest $1 fee for departing passengers only:
Richmond, Va.; Sarasota-Brandenton, Fla.; Huntsville, Ala.; and Tri-City Airport at Saginaw, Mich.
A spokesman for the Air Transport Association said since the head taxes at the airports went into effect , a Saturday, they have not yet been fully tested.
“The big crunch comes tomorrow,” he said.
Many other cities are eyeing their airports as potential new sources of revenue in the light of a Supreme Court decision upholding the use and service charges in New Hampshire and Evansville, Ind.
As for the situation at Philadelphia, the ATA vice president for public affairs, Warren N. Martin described it as “an ungodly mess.”
“The head-tax collection problems, combined with the heavy holiday traffic jammed the terminal area with long, long lines of passengers in front of all ticket counters,” Martin said.
“Thousands of people refused to pay the tax, upon which refusal most carriers asked the passenger to fill out and sign a special form.
“When one person in the line started to fill out a form, the domino theory took effect and the rest of the line refused and went through the time-consuming procedure of completing the form.”
Airline representatives said they are prohibited by law from refusing tickets to persons who paid the published fare, regardless of payment of the $2 tax.
Philadelphia city officials said steps would be taken to collect the delinquent taxes.
But airline representatives said some passengers even refused to give their names on the tax-denial forms and thus could not be traced.
The city has proposed also to fine the airlines $100 to $300 for failure to collect the tax.
An astute reader reminded me that the federal excise tax on long-distance service has been dropped, and that tax now only applies to your local land-line if you’ve got one.
For more information on resisting this federal excise tax, see the newly-revamped Hang Up On War! website.
