Zandberg wants to tax private jets. How many of them are there in Poland?
The left is in favor of taxing private jets, of taxing the private air transport of millionaires, said Adrian Zandberg in Lublin. Such a tax would certainly support the budget of the United States, where a jet is already a normal part of the “household” of the richest businessmen and celebrities.
In 2000, the fleet of private planes in the world amounted to less than 10,000. machines, in mid-2022 – over 23,000 The use of private planes has increased by approximately 20% since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2022, these machines performed 5.3 million flight operations.
More and more private jets
Flying on such machines emits at least 10 times more greenhouse gases per person than scheduled flights, so the richest 1 percent of people are responsible for about half of the CO2 emissions from air travel – all this information comes from a report by the US Institute of Policy Studies.
In the United States, one in six flights is performed by a private aircraft, yet the owners of private aircraft do not contribute enough to maintaining the flight surveillance system. Cruises taken by the richest on a daily basis pay only 2%. taxes financing the flight safety system.
Elon Musk is famous for his passion for flying private jets. The press carefully calculates how much his dynamic lifestyle affects the environment. If reports are to be believed, in 2022 the billionaire made 171 flights and contributed to the burning of over 837,000. liters of aviation fuel and emissions of over 2.1 thousand tons of CO2.
The latest published data on private jets registered in Poland comes from 2021: there were almost 24,000 of them then. As for the “European backyard”, most planes fly to and from Great Britain. The most popular route traveled by businessmen with their own plane is London-Brussels.
Adrian Zandberg on the taxation of private aircraft
Adrian Zandberg, an MP from the Left, would not like Europe to follow the example of the United States and announced that the Left in the European Parliament would strive to tax private jets and spend the money on the expansion of railway infrastructure.
– We need much greater European funds than ever before for the European railway, both for the expansion of local connections (…) and for the construction of a high-speed railway that will connect our continent much more than today, Zandberg said at a meeting with voters in Lublin.
He warned that if the Christian Democrats have a majority in the EP, “it will be the same”, i.e. Europe will be “a little too close to large corporations” and too far from “the affairs of ordinary people”.