Tourists Are a Tempting Target for Tax Men

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 21, 2001 | by Sean Paige

In the never-ending search for innovative ways to raise revenues while reducing the risk of popular backlash, governments have found a tempting and easy target in tourists and travelers. They're on the move. They've got money in pocket and places to go. And best of all, they're from out of town and just passing through. So, even if they're aware of the mounting list of fees, surcharges or other shakedowns coming their way, they aren't inclined or organized to protest against them.

Travelers through Boston's Logan International Airport -- in a state long noted for its groundbreaking work in raising revenues -- likely soon will see a new fee added to the half-dozen others hidden in the fine print of airline tickets, car-rental agreements and hotel bills. The new tax is the result of a Massachusetts state law requiring facilities to cap emissions of nitrogen oxide at or below 1999 levels. The gas commonly is blamed for causing acid rain, and airliners are prodigious emitters of such gases.

How the fee actually will reduce those emissions isn't yet clear, since passenger traffic at Logan is expected to increase by 7 million people during the next decade. Still, state officials are hailing it as the greatest thing since the Stamp Act, and it is a precedent likely to proliferate to other airports nationwide. The $15 million in revenues the fee is expected to raise will do absolutely nothing to actually cut emissions from jetliners because that would make them noisier, causing another set of complaints from the peanut gallery. Funds instead will be used to encourage nitrogen-oxide reductions in other sources at the airport: by upgrading the facility's heating system, for example.

Massachusetts isn't alone in passing off the costs of its programs and problems to unwary travelers. California has of late levied a $3-per-night surcharge on hotel rooms to help defray the mounting costs of its myopic energy policies and the governor's half-baked approach to deregulation. Other Western states now are mimicking this add-on, though few apparently face energy problems quite as acute.

If vacation plans take you to or through Seattle, Phoenix or Houston this summer, you likely will be dragooned into paying for new sports stadiums being built in those cities, thanks to a fee or surcharge added to airline tickets, rental-car bills or hotel-room rates. Harris County, Texas, is paying for an Astrodome replacement by adding a 5 percent charge to car rentals at Houston's airport. Maricopa County, Ariz., where citizens last fall approved construction of a grandiose new stadium for the perennially mediocre Arizona Cardinals, now tacks on a 3.25 percent car-rental charge to help cover its cost. In fact, surcharges, fees and other kinds of taxes comprise nearly 30 percent of the cost of renting a car at the Phoenix airport.

Local folks apparently are all for publicly financing stadiums and subsidizing wealthy team owners and millionaire ballplayers as long as out-of-towners are doing the financing. All of which gives a whole new meaning to the term tourist trap.