Airport fees and tax hikes on virtually everything. On a recent trip to New Orleans, I paid taxes of 13-20% on every hotel room, 12-19% taxes on rental cars, 30 dollars a day to park the car in New Orleans. Long term parking costs at airports is ridiculous as well. These local taxes and fees are unavoidable and every municipality in the US seems to mine that same gold mine.

I just refuse to fly if at all possible.

One other point. With 40 million people out of work, people can’t afford to fly. So it doesn’t really matter just how much government wants to lie and fudge unemployment numbers.

The truth is all around you. It is in the 47 million people getting food stamps, the ginormous deficit each year because there are no jobs to tax. Unemployed people generally don’t fly unless someone else buys the ticket.

Now the government wants to tax us all some more.
There will be even less people flying after that.

BTW Team Dave: The never used, ten years old, overflow parking lot needs a sealcoat. So start thinking about how you’re going to pay for the upkeep on all these seldom used facilities. Even the school districts will close and sell an empty building, and they are expert at wasting money.

We now live in a maximum (phony) security state, where various government agencies are allowed to collect our personal information as they wish.

Interesting that this doesn’t seem to bother the Repugs among us. Maybe the Libertarians don’t approve of it? Dunno.

The attack on the World Trade Center was a criminal act and nothing more, not some act of war. Yeah it made for spectacular video, but big deal. In the intervening years far far more people have died in car crashes.

The real blame goes to the pilots of those aircraft who let the hijackers in the cockpit. Why does no one talk about this?

If they had not let the hijackers in the cockpit and if airline policy had been to allow passengers to beat hijackers to death we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Remember, the policy back then was for flight attendants to demand no interference from passengers. Passengers who tried to fight hijackers would have been arrested just as if they tried to use their cell phone during take off and landing.