Imagine the airfare price chardonnay-sipping first class fliers paid while traveling direct from San Francisco to Paris during peak travel season and it's not even close to what the government is spending on flights within the state of New Mexico.
While a traveler pays about $200 for a round-trip flight between Albuquerque and
a small city called Alamogordo, New Mexico, the federal government's share of that ticket is $3,623, thanks to generous subsidies
from the Essential Air Service (EAS) program.
The
EAS program has been considered a necessity ever since the Airline Deregulation
act of 1978 gave airlines almost free reign to choose which markets
to serve and which rates to charge according to a supply-and-demand-based,
real-life model of economy. Through
the program, the Department of Transportation subsidizes commuter airlines
to serve approximately 140 rural communities across the country that
otherwise wouldn’t be economically practical to acknowledge, let alone visit by plane.
The program
has fought through more than 30 years of scarcity both of passengers
and of airlines willing to provide the flights. In the case of the Albuquerque-Alamogordo
flight, New Mexico Airlines makes 12 round trips per week with an average
of less than one passenger daily.
Six airline carriers in the last
two years have either left the program or gone out of business.
Even
so, politicians protect the taxpayer-funded program fiercely. A letter directed to the White House budget director
and signed by both New Mexico senators, Jeff Bingaman and Tom Udall, characterized the subsidies as essential.
“Adequate air service has become imperative to the success of our
local economies,” the letter said. “[It] was a promise
made to rural America and a promise that must be kept.”
The two New
Mexico Democrats were among 22 senators who signed the letter, and their support of the EAS is representative of Congress as a whole, whose representatives covet the pork planes. It is perhaps this support, that has spared the EAS a major budget slashing by the "line-by-line" federal budget hawks within the Obama administration. In fact, Obama's new budget proposes to add $55 million, an increase of more
than 40 percent, to air-service subsidies. It seems the political chits of keeping the EAS for members of Congress surpasses the importance of protecting taxpayers from wasteful government spending. Just another thing that makes you say: OhMyGov!
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