Sen. Ed Markey announces bill to raise taxes on private jets and their ultra-wealthy passengers
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- Sen. Ed Markey on Wednesday announced legislation to raise taxes on jet fuel used by private planes.
- The Massachusetts Democrat proposed raising private jet-fuel taxes from $0.22 to $1.95 per gallon.
- Private jet travel, which is the most polluting form of transport, has surged in recent years.
Sen. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, on Wednesday announced legislation to raise taxes on private jet fuel and use the revenue to fund air monitoring in vulnerable communities and long-term investments in public transportation.
The bill — called the Fueling Alternative Transportation with a Carbon Aviation Tax (FATCAT) Act — would raise federal taxes on private jet fuel from $0.22 to $1.95 per gallon.
Private jet travel has surged in recent years. But private travelers pay a significantly smaller share of taxes used to maintain US airports and keep airspace safe than commercial flyers do, according to a recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies and Patriotic Millionaires.
Private planes make up about one in every six flights handled by the Federal Aviation Administration's air-traffic controllers, but private travelers pay just two percent of the taxes used to fund the agency, the report found. Commercial flyers pay a tax on every ticket equivalent to 7.5% of the fare price on top of a facility fee of up to $4.50 per flight, while private flyers only pay jet-fuel tax.
And private jet owners are among the wealthiest people in the world, with a median net worth of $190 million, the IPS report found.
"The 1 percent can't free ride on our environment and our infrastructure at a discount," Markey, who sits on the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, said in a statement provided to Insider. "Billionaires and the ultra-wealthy are getting a bargain, paying less in taxes each year to fly private and contribute more pollution than millions of drivers combined on the roads below."
He went on, "It's time to ground these fat cats and make them pay their fair share so that we can invest in building public transportation that communities across the country and our economy desperately need."
The tax revenue would support a Clean Communities Trust Fund that would be managed by Treasury and used to support air quality monitoring and affordable public transportation, including passenger rail and bus systems near commercial airports.
A press release announcing the bill cited the IPS report, which recommended the government double the federal jet-fuel tax — from $0.219 per gallon to $0.438 per gallon — to discourage short flights and fund sustainability efforts.
"If we can't phase it out, we should tax it at a high level and use that money to build a better transit system," Chuck Collins, the director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at IPS and a coauthor of the report, told Insider in May.
The surge in private jet travel raises serious environmental concerns. Because private jets carry many fewer passengers than commercial planes, they emit up to 14 times more climate-warming pollution per passenger than commercial flights, according to a 2021 report by the NGO Transport & Environment.
A spokesperson for Markey noted that the wealthiest one percent of people worldwide cause more than twice as much carbon dioxide emissions as the poorest 50% of the world's population between 1990 and 2015.