Biden Wants to Tax Private Jets

The Biden Administration is out to clip some executive wings.

A New York Times report published Thursday highlights Joe Biden’s drive to impose higher taxes on private jets. It’s a tax that dovetails with the other policies Biden announced in his State of the Union speech, many of which are geared towards higher rates of taxation on society’s upper echelons. 

Crashing the PJ Party

Private jets (or PJs as Roman Roy likes to call them) have been growing steadily more popular since the onset of the pandemic, and PJ usage has been dragged into the public eye thanks in part to jet-tracking teen Jack Sweeney, who managed to make enemies out of both Elon Musk and Taylor Swift.

Per the NYT, corporate jets benefit from tax breaks not available to commercial aircraft, tax breaks which allow companies to pay lower fuel taxes and write off the cost of private jets more swiftly. But the Biden administration wants to put an end to that:

• Biden’s plans would hike the tax rate on private jet fuel by 386% over the next five years, from 28.1 cents on the gallon to $1.08. It also wants to lengthen the amount of time over which a business can write off the cost of a private aircraft from five years to seven, the same time frame that applies to commercial planes.
• The US government is already closely monitoring private jets, according to comments from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Thursday. She said in a statement to the Senate Committee on Finance that the Internal Revenue Service is “launching a new initiative to end abuse of corporate jet write-offs.”

Ed Bolen, president and chief executive of the National Business Aviation Association, pushed back against the planned tax hikes in quotes to the NYT. “We haven’t seen any real justification on why an important and essential American industry is being targeted for tax increases,” Bolen said.

Good Luck, We’re All Counting on You: While the private aviation market gears up for a policy fight, the commercial industry is keeping its fighting in the family. The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that a group of US airline CEOs are trying to set a meeting with Boeing’s board of directors to discuss the never-ending fiascos the company has faced since a door blew off an Alaska Airlines plane mid-flight. Now that’s a meeting that is gonna need one heck of a pastry selection.