My response to an X user who wrote “Usually it’s an exaggeration to claim that the other side is lunatic socialism. With Kamala 2024 that’s become a reality we face.”:
I don’t think that it is fair to call Democrats “socialists”. Under Socialism, e.g., in the Soviet Union, able-bodied citizens were required to work or be guilty of the crime of “Parasitism”. There were no undocumented immigrants. Certainly, a Soviet family couldn’t spend four generations living in public housing, getting free health care via Medicaid, shopping for food with EBT, and chatting on an Obamaphone. Kamala Harris and friends propose a system in which half of a country works/commutes 60 hours/week so that the other half can relax and play Xbox. That’s not a political system contemplated by Marx or Lenin. Maybe it should be called Xboxism?
Note that the above idea isn’t original. “Transferism, Not Socialism, Is the Drug Americans Are Hooked On” (Foundation for Economic Education):
Transferism is a system in which one group of people forces a second group to pay for things that the people believe they, or some third group, should have. Transferism isn’t about controlling the means of production. It is about the forced redistribution of what’s produced.
I think Xboxism is an easier term to understand, though, because it captures what government policy enables. And now that we have open borders we need a term that covers a migrant family that arrives to take up the Maskachusetts offer of guaranteed shelter forever even if nobody ever tries to work but instead enjoys a life of permanent leisure.
Related:
- Wikipedia page on Social parasitism
- Rethinking 99 weeks of unemployment (2011; the idea that an able-bodied working-age American could relax at home for literally years got a boost after the Collapse of 2008 with the 99-week unemployment check scheme)
As dialectic materialism teaches us, x-boxism is socialism with American face. Socialism for country that, unlike Soviet Russia, started reach and free but is going the way of USSR, due to socialist policies. @philg has a potential to become modern classic of American socialism, father of x-boxism.
Started rich. Not started reach
Kamalif’s down payment subsidies, ADU subsidies, & solar panel subsidies soon to join the student loan forgiveness for the rich.
Wow Phil – you must be really suffering from all those welfare receipients. Why don’t we really clean up drain on the govenment coffers by stopping all the government largess to small public airfields: https://www.faa.gov/airports/aip/2024_aip_grants/AIP_A3_07262024.pdf?
After all, what societal benefit do we achieve from rich retired people flying their Cirrus around on permanent vacation?
Craig: You might have missed the fact that aviation infrastructure in the US, including the AIP, is funded by user fees, e.g., taxes on fuel purchased by the Cirrus owners whom you cite (though, in reality, the lion’s share of fuel taxes are paid by Taylor Swift and similar). This is explained to the peasantry at https://www.faa.gov/airports/aip/overview
In 1970, a more comprehensive program was established with the passage of the Airport and Airway Development Act of 1970. This Act provided grants for airport planning under the Planning Grant Program (PGP) and for airport development under the Airport Development Aid Program (ADAP). These programs were funded from a newly established Airport and Airway Trust Fund, into which were deposited revenues from several aviation-user taxes on such items as airline fares, air freight, and aviation fuel. The authority to issue grants under these two programs expired on September 30, 1981. During this 11-year period, 8,809 grants totaling $4.5 billion were approved.
The current program, known as the Airport Improvement Program (AIP), was established by the Airport and Airway Improvement Act of 1982 (Public Law 97-248). Since then, the AIP has been amended several times, most recently with the passage of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012. Funds obligated for the AIP are drawn from the Airport and Airway Trust fund, which is supported by user fees, fuel taxes, and other similar revenue sources.
Note that Eisenhower set up the Interstate Highway system to be funded by fuel taxes so that non-drivers wouldn’t be forced to pay for roads that they weren’t going to use. I think that his vision might have been perverted by later politicians, however, who didn’t want to raise fuel taxes enough to keep up with the inflation that the government tells us doesn’t exist. For aviation, however, the taxes on fuel and airline tickets have kept up with the declining value of the dollar.
Phil it looks like the bulk of funding for the Trust Fund come from passenger fees:
“The Trust Fund provides the primary source of funding for FAA and receives revenues principally from a variety of excise taxes paid by users of the National Airspace System. The excise taxes are imposed on domestic passenger tickets, domestic flight segments, and international passenger arrivals and departures, and on purchases of air travel miles for frequent flyer and similar programs. In addition, taxes are imposed on air cargo waybills and aviation fuel purchases. The largest source of excise tax revenues are related to transportation of passengers.”
Please tell me why I’m paying more for an airline ticket to help improve a field I will most likely never fly into? What kind of perverse socialism is that?
It makes sense that airline passengers pay the majority of overall airport costs because air carrier runways are much more expensive to build than GA airport runways. The damage to a runway is non-linear in the weight of the aircraft using it. See https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2023/09/25/cost-to-build-a-runway-in-our-inflation-free-economy-over-500-million/ for example.
I am not sure why you think that 3000 lb. Cirruses aren’t paying their fair share of the overall costs. The Cirrus doesn’t require a 10,000’ runway nor a runway that can handle a 700,000 lb. aircraft.
Why would it make sense? Large airports generate way more economic benefit to the local area than a GA only airport. In fact – you could call cash going to the large airports an investment, whereas it would be a stretch to call another $500k going to a podunk field somewhere an investment.
In addition, if I understand the information correctly, there were a number of supplemental appropriations over the past few years paid for by the General fund that have gone to the program.
Getting back to your concern over welfare queens and multigenerational benefits dependency, it would be refreshing to see some work by you on the biggest benefactors of the welfare state, which I have a suspicion are not the welfare queens. If Medicaid is the largest welfare program in dollar terms, should we spend some time figuring out why there is so much fraud by medical providers, and the recent trend of private equity buying health care systems and squeezing customers such as the Government?
Craig: You don’t seem to have any data to offer. And nobody said that airport projects were supposed to be an “investment”. Airline passengers pay a ticket tax, charter customers pay an excise tax, and climate-concerned Gulfstream owners pay a fuel tax. These user fees are supposed to pay for the ongoing costs of building and maintaining airports (the runways and taxiways; not the terminal buildings). Do all of the Gulfstreams and similar private jets that pay fuel taxes sufficient to fund runway maintenance at GA-only https://www.airnav.com/airport/kteb ? You seem to be assuming that they don’t and that airline passengers at nearby KEWR pay more than what it costs to keep the runways at Newark maintained. But you haven’t cited any source for your belief that airline passengers are being fleeced. Nor have you cited any source for your belief that having KEWR available to peasants generates more productive economic activity per dollar spent on taxiways and runways than having KTEB available to the elite. (You’ve said that KEWR generates more economic activity than KTEB, which might be true, but you didn’t adjust for the vastly higher cost of maintaining KEWR.)
Gemini says “Some have questioned if aviation system users receive a fair share of government spending given the excise taxes they pay, due to the fund’s accumulated surplus” if you try to research the question of whether user fees are sufficient to cover the aggregate expenses, but I don’t know of a good source that would either prove or disprove your assertion that taxpayers are getting ripped off by Cirrus owners.
(Separately, you might want to consider the climate change and immigration angles. If the Climate Doomers are correct we will need airports more than ever to support disaster relief. https://www.hickorync.gov/inclement-weather-updates-hurricane-helene says “Emergency response operations related to Helene continue at Hickory Regional Airport.” The last commercial flight at this airport in North Carolina was in 2005: https://www.hickorync.gov/about-hickory-airport . If our borders stay open and U.S. population grows to exceed China’s (some projections say that happens in 2100) traffic jams in the U.S. will be epic and people will need to get around via EVTOL. Americans don’t have much social cohesion and won’t have any after another 75 years of open borders. So the only place that Americans will be able to agree that EVTOL noise is acceptable will be… airports.)
As a side note Hurricane Milton looks like it’s heading right your way – hope you have enough time to get prepared and it doesn’t get very destructive. I used to go through a lot of typhoons in East Asia, but it seems like their infrastructure somehow was mostly able to handle even large storms. I even once got hit by the same typhoon twice. Got hit in Japan and then hit in Korea a few days later by the same typhoon.
Craig: Thanks for the kind wishes. I’m in Fort Worth right now and hoping to get home to Jupiter tomorrow night. As of right now, Jupiter is forecast to mostly get heavy rain and a moderate amount of wind. Of course, the unionized public school teachers will get a day or two of taxpayer-funded vacation! They actually got a vacation for Hurricane Helene as well, which struck what would have been 5 states away if considered on a Northeast geographical scale. Abacoa has never flooded so I hope that the water will drain away. We’ll be on the south side of the hurricane, assuming current track forecasts are correct, which means that water will be blown out to sea.
not even subsidized unemployed people would buy the xbox
I’d buy it if I had time to play it.