Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast—ADS-B Out—is an aviation safety aircraft transponder system that broadcasts, via satellite, an airplane’s location, altitude, speed, and identification number so that the FAA’s air traffic controllers can more readily track the airplane and its physical relationship with other aircraft in the vicinity. It’s an expensive addition to aircraft that was inflicted on sold to general aviation pilots on the government’s promise that the system would be used only for aviation safety and for no other government purpose.
ADS-B gave them [government taxmen] an instant high-tech snoop tool, including the ability to claim owners are registering planes in one place but parking them elsewhere. Jeff Prang, the assessor for Los Angeles County, recently bragged to Politico that the county is using ADS-B to take the tax hammer to owners of 1,000 planes it claims have been “avoiding” “$35 million in local property taxes.”
Now we get ADS-B In, proposed in House and Senate bills, which allows pilots to see for themselves the aircraft around them.
House Republicans…used the revival of the [ADS-B] issue to remedy the original tax sin, forbidding any government agency from using ADS-B “for the purpose of obtaining revenue.”
And we get the response from the Left:
[S]afety means little to the tax officials wailing that they will lose this new “efficient” way to tax—as if Americans are obligated to make their jobs easy. It also means little to Democrats, who see a new front in the class war
It’s more than just petty taxman convenience, though. According to them, the money an employer pays an employee isn’t that employee’s money. It belongs to the government; the employee is merely a middleman on that road. Or, as that LA tax assessor implied, a highwayman needing handling.
Notice that it’s Progressive-Democratic Party politicians who are defending ADS-B Out’s use as a tax collection facility and who are demanding to use ADS-B In for the same purpose.