One of the most ludicrous boondoggles in the federal government is the so-called Essential Air Service program, which costs taxpayers $200 million a year. There’s nothing “essential” about it.
The program massively subsidizes flights to and from more than 100 rural communities around the country – communities that could not possibly support those flights otherwise because they don’t have enough people who regularly need to fly.
To get an idea of how ridiculous the program is, a single passenger flying from tiny Ely, Nev., is subsidized by the government to the tune of around $5,000 – besides what he pays for the ticket! Only about 400 people took flights from Ely in 2008, and some of the subsidized flights carried nobody but the crew.
We can’t understand how anybody in Congress thinks that constitutes “Essential Air Service.”
The Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives has sensibly voted to phase out these costly subsidies by late 2013. The Democrat-run Senate wrongly favors keeping the subsidies for most of the airports.