Private Plane Sector Surging In Increasingly Inegalitarian America

Christine Haughney reports on the recovery summer:

For decades, parents in the Northeast who sent their children to summer camp faced the same arduous logistics of traveling long distances to remote towns in Maine, New Hampshire and upstate New York to pick up their children or to attend parents' visiting day. Now, even as the economy limps along, more of the nation's wealthier families are cutting out the car ride and chartering planes to fly to summer camps. One private jet broker, Todd Rome of Blue Star Jets, said his summer-camp business had jumped 30 percent over the last year. This weekend, a popular choice for visiting day at camps, private planes jammed the runways at small rural airports.

This, needless to say, is why progressive taxation is a good idea. Very rich people experience a sharply declining marginal utility of money. If this kind of high-end consumption was more heavily taxed with the proceeds used to finance the consumption of the less fortunate, overall well-being could be easily enhanced.