In the US, passengers pay an average of $45 in taxes every time they buy an airline ticket, up about six per cent since 1993. Now, finance ministers from France and Germany have a creative, new tax we can pay. Our Savvy Traveler, Rudy Maxa, explains.

You may only know me as a travel journalist, but I'm SO much more. As a consumer and traveler, I helped build Seattle's baseball stadium. I'm active in financing tourism promotion in Denver. In fact, all over the world, I've helped modernize airports and financed public transportation projects.

How do I do all these things? Well, when I rent a car or stay in a hotel, I'm taxed to help pay for local projects like those. You see, travelers are easy targets because they don't vote in the towns they're visiting. So they can't throw out the politicans who hit them up for some spare change by taxing them for projects that usually don't benefit them.

Now a couple of European finance ministers have a Really Big Idea. They raised it last month at the G8 meeting in Scotland, that conclave of the world's wealthiest nations. I thought the idea would die right there, but it didn't. The European Commission has been assigned to study the feasibility of taxing airline tickets worldwide to raise money for poor nations in Africa.

Granted, at this stage, the tax would be voluntary. But what country would want to look like a cheapskate if this scheme is implemented? Heck, I risk sounding like an insensitive lout for even raising my voice in protest of this tax.

But here's what I think: Third world countries have enormous debts thanks to banks and international lending organizations such as the World Bank and the IMF. Those bank took bad risks, so they should pay the price.

Last month the finance ministers of the Group of 8 industrial nations did agree to cancel at least $40 billion in debt owed by some of the world's poorest countries.

Great. But dunning airline passengers? That's a government issue, and if the US as a country wants to offer debt relief, fine. But travelers are as much about poverty in Africa ad I am about a baseball stadium in Seattle. So why tax someone flying from Toledo to Houston?

Oh, that's right--we can't vote.

July 27, 2005