Spirit Airlines Celebrates FAA Shutdown, Wants Congress to Eliminate Taxes or Something
On Monday we flagged for you the unofficial airfare tax holiday that the United States is currently "enjoying," courtesy of Washington DC being the most insanely dysfunctional place on the planet.
Without getting into too many details: House Republicans told Senate Democrats that they would only fund the FAA if three powerful Senate Democrats gave up on something called the Essential Air Service, which is a program that sends a bunch of money to (ironically) totally inessential rural airports in those Senators' states. Everyone from liberal journalists to travel bloggers agree that the subsidies are totally unjustifiable, so this was partly an attempt to embarrass the Democrats. The Republicans basically said "there's no way you guys are shameless enough to hold up FAA funding just to keep sending obviously wasteful pork to tiny airports in your states," to which the Democrats responded "actually, we're exactly that shameless." And that's why there are no airfare taxes right now, because FAA doesn't have enough money to collect money.
The sad thing is that we don't have the space to dwell on that insanity, because of course Spirit Airlines looked at both sides of the political aisle and said "you want to see shameless... we'll show you shameless."
The douchetastic LCC, last seen exploiting the Schwarzenegger-Shriver split and sending strippermobiles into the streets, has launched an entire campaign named "Don't Tax Me Bro" to eliminate airline taxes or something. It's hard to tell.
They're addressing people "who would be directly harmed by an increased tax burden," which isn't really what's going to happen once the FAA starts getting funded again, and they're also referencing a bunch of legislation that seems to have very little chance of passing.
The entire thing seems like a very elaborate attempt to troll Congress by getting people to email them incoherent letters about airline taxes. And listen. The only thing we support more than trolling Congress is keeping airline taxes low. But setting up an entire website, to do it for no reason other than to get some publicity, and forcing Congressional interns to field letters and phone calls right now? Maybe wait until next week, after Washington is done melting down the global economy.
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