> People aren't happy about it though, so promising to remove the taxes is a way to win votes at the next election. The incentive becomes a voter bargaining chi

> People aren't happy about it though, so promising to remove the taxes is a way to win votes at the next election. The incentive becomes a voter bargaining chip rather than an practical long term solution. Maybe, but that hasn't really been how most other taxes have worked. Cigarettes for instance are heavily taxed, but you don't see a lot of people running on reducing those taxes. > We need a solution that actually stops a majority of people wanting to fly so much, then removing the taxation isn't a way to win votes, and consequently it remains in place as disincentive to those who do want to fly. It seems to me that raising the price of travel will stop people wanting to fly so much. I think the problem with flight right now is it got just cheap enough that the upper-middle class can afford to do it quite frequently. And once that happens, it starts to permeate the culture in the way that you are now seeing. If you double the cost, it will start to fade back out again. Additionally, while leisure travel might be the most visible to a lot of people, there is a tremendous amount of business travel, and that probably makes up the majority of all air traffic. If I had to guess, i'd say 80% of that business travel is unnecessary. For instance, I work at a financial firm, and that firm employs analysts who study companies. Periodically these analysts fly out to go to "investor days" and do things like meet with company management. The marginal utility of them being physically in the same space as these people is probably quite close to zero. If the cost of flights were substantially increased, my guess is that they would stop this practice entirely, or curtail it quite a bit.