If you travel on a plane that looks like this, then you’re paying for people to travel like this. [CHORAL MUSIC] You heard that right. If you’re a member of the economy class, the seat reclined in your face class, the overhead compartment won’t close class, then you’re subsidizing this guy. “I’m actually going to Vegas on my jet, [BLEEP].” You’re subsidizing a class of people who would probably call this thing the public plane. It sounds absurd, but it’s true. And it’s why we think it’s time for Congress to stop making us pay for them. This is the opinion of the New York Times editorial board. Each time you buy a plane ticket, you pay a small tax that you probably ignore. It goes to the F.A.A., whose job it is to make sure that your plane doesn’t crash. That tax might sound reasonable, but here’s the problem. Only some of us are paying it. Consider the nation’s busiest passenger route between Atlanta and Orlando. The passengers on a commercial flight would collectively be charged about $2,300 in F.A.A. fees. But a private jet flying on that same route? Well, it would only cost them about 60 bucks. And when you zoom out, well, private jets account for about 7 percent of the flights that the F.A.A. manages, but they only account for about 0.6 percent of the fees that they collect. To understand how absurd this is, just imagine that the federal government opened a parking garage. They charge $20 for parking, except for the fanciest cars, which only have to pay $0.25. That’s essentially our current model for funding the F.A.A. Now, before we blame Congress, it’s important to understand how we got here, and then we can circle back and blame Congress. In the 1970s, aviation in the United States was booming. The government needed to fund a major expansion of airports and air traffic control. And they decided that the people who fly should pay the bill. So they created a bunch of new taxes. The biggest, by far, was a tax on tickets. Every…