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With Congress reconvening today, battles over how to shrink the federal deficit will be front and center again—and new air passenger fees are among the proposals on the table. The Obama administration is calling in its fiscal 2014 budget for the so-called Sept. 11 security fee to rise up to threefold, raking in $25.9 billion over a decade – and adding several dollars to the price of many tickets.
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The security-fee proposal seeks to raise the maximum Aviation Passenger Security Fee to $7.50 by 2019, through 50-cent annual increases. Today, the fee ranges from $2.50 to $5.00 for each one-way flight segment. The government plans to use roughly 70% of the new fees—or $18 billion—to cover the deficit. The rest would go to fund the Transportation Security Administration and the Federal Air Marshal Service over that 10-year period, the administration says.
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This isn’t the first time the Obama administration has proposed these types of fee hikes to cut the deficit. In 2011, the White House tried to get that $100-per-flight departure tax off the ground without success. With Republican leaders in Congress taking a broad antitax stance, the chances of all these proposals becoming law are relatively slim, but some lawmakers who otherwise oppose tax hikes have said they’re amenable to raising user fees.
When do we cut more spending?? It's not only about raising taxes...
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