Obama’s latest budget includes a $5.00 per bag charge for TSA to screen out luggage.
The Daily Mail reported:
The cost of travel will take off if President Obama’s budget is approved out of hand because he plans to add fees to passengers and take away existing grants to airports in an effort to reduce the deficit.
In his budget put forth Monday, the President mapped out a way to accrue $32billion for the government over the next decade.
The Obama administration wants major carriers, their passengers, business jets and airports to pick up more of the costs of air travel and airport improvements that for years have been borne by taxpayers.
New fees are sure to trigger strong opposition from airlines and other aviation groups who argue that the industry is already over-taxed and over-regulated.
Ideas quietly floated and then discarded during congressional budget negotiations last summer re-emerged in the fiscal 2013 transportation and homeland security portions of the White House budget sent to Congress that outlines $4trillion in deficit reduction.
Under the proposal, ticket fees that help pay for passenger and bag security screening at more than 400 U.S. airports would double to a mandatory minimum of $5 per one-way trip.The fee would jump 50 cents per year beginning in 2014, raising the total to $7.50 in 2018.
Glenn Reynolds added this on the “grope hike.”
Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and TSA critic who blogs at Instapundit.com, slammed the fee as good money after bad — the TSA has been widely criticized for incompetence and abusive searches.
“I’m not against user fees,” Reynolds said. “But this is not a user fee. This is a fee for being used. I don’t think the TSA does any good at all. Every dollar that goes to them is a waste. More dollars is more waste. I think the TSA should be abolished.”
Reynolds, a gun rights advocate, said that with a reported $32 billion total package of proposed airport fees and cuts, “for that kind of money, they could give every frequent flier a gun, which would do more to stop hijackings than the TSA clown show.”
Agreed.
