Jeff’s big adventure

Coming just a few days after Richard Branson slipped the surly bonds of Earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings, Jeff Bezos’ brief hurtle into space, planned for tonight, is one small step for a billionaire, and one slightly larger leap for brandkind.

Much ink has already been spilled about how little Bezos-founded Amazon pays in federal income taxes, not to mention how little the former CEO himself has forked over to the feds ($973 million during a five-year period when his wealth grew $100 billion, for a “true tax rate,” as ProPublica put it, of 0.98%). But we wondered what taxes and fees Bezos and his fellow Blue Origin passengers — including 18-year-old Dutch student Oliver Daemon, the son of a millionaire private equity CEO — are paying in taxes and fees the likes of which hammer ordinary air travelers every lousy day.

We schlubs pay the government a 7.5% passenger ticket tax, a 6.25% cargo tax, a segment fee of up to $4 per leg of a flight, a $5.60 fee to fund the Transportation Security Administration, and many more taxes that get tacked on international travel. Then there are baggage fees, which can be a heavy lift indeed.

How will government ding those who enter orbit and beyond? A 7.5% levy on the $28 million that an anonymous passenger paid to go up alongside Bezos — before he gave up his seat due to a scheduling conflict, leaving it to the teen millionaire spawn — would tack on $2.1 million.

We’re not saying the public necessarily needs a cut of every space flight, but it does irk just a little that, as of 2019, 67 space companies had pocketed a total of $7.2 billion in taxpayer investments between 2000 and 2018.

A few more taxes and fees on these flights of fancy would seem to be fair payback. Then, we can talk about making them wait in check-in lines and go through security.