Ill-Gotten Planes

Oprah and other bazillionaires agree: The best part about being rich is having a private plane. Leave it to Congress to wangle the best perk of wealth courtesy of America's coach-flying suckers. As P.J. O'Rourke recently put it to reason.tv: "Politics itself is nothing but an attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit."

Naturally, Congress is also overpaying for their ill-gotten planes. They're handing over $66 million for each $49 million plane. Perhaps they're exercising the Contact theory of government spending—overfund and secretly procure two of everything? This hypothesis is only slightly undermined by the public decision to double the number of planes purchased.

If flying among the unwashed masses is really too much to bear, surely an option like private plane sharing service NetJets would have been more cost-effective. Of course, at no point in these deliberations—or most of the coverage for that matter—did anyone consider that congressmen might fly coach. We all remember this one to the auto execs few months back: "I'm going to ask the three executives here to raise their hand if they flew here commercial." The Big Three CEOs must be enjoying some pretty serious schadenfreude right now.

Congressmen needs a bunch of jets to get around. Fair enough. But you know, Congress used to have an entire fleet of Boeing and Gulfstream planes at its disposal—the jets of every major corporation in America. A few pesky campaign finance laws later and suddenly getting from place-to-place isn't as easy as it used to be, eh Nancy?

It's worth a moment of reflection—what's worse: congressional jets or congressmen on corporate jets?