James Oberstar: “Mr. Speaker, to characterize this bill as a tax increase is a disservice to truth, to history, and to aviation. The…”

“Mr. Speaker, to characterize this bill as a tax increase is a disservice to truth, to history, and to aviation. The truth simply is that this bill represents the reinstatement of a fee. It is called a tax, but it has been treated as a fee, a fee that was the unintended victim of the budgetary train wreck that we engaged in at the end of 1995 and the beginning of 1996. Nobody intended that this fee, that these funds should lapse. It is only fair, it is only fair to air travelers that we reinstate this fee and these funds into the Aviation Trust Fund. The history that we would be disserving is that in 1970 air travelers of this country, through the Congress, agreed to impose a fee to be deposited in a trust fund like the Highway Trust Fund for the purposes of aviation, to serve the needs of a growing sector of our economy, which sector today represents $600 billion, 10 percent of our gross domestic product in the United States. To allow this fee to lapse and the funding that goes into the Aviation Trust Fund to lapse would be a disservice to aviation. It would mean that there would be no money for airport construction unless we are prepared to appropriate funds out of the general revenues, which, in effect, would be a real tax increase on the rest of the American economy.”