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Airline Fat Tax

Jun 26, 2009

I was reading through the CNN stories this afternoon and came across one that caught my attention. This article is called "Airline policies juggle larger passengers"which details how airlines are going to begin charging overweight passengers for a second seat. Here are the little summary bullets that CNN puts on every article:

Obesity rates have grown in the last 25 years but plane seat sizes remain the same

A growing number of airlines are creating polices to deal with heavier passengers

Heavier passengers cost more fuel and space, say some passengers

National Association of Fat Acceptance says it's unsafe to cram passengers

Ok, let me talk to a couple of these:

Obesity rates have grown in the last 25 years but plane seat sizes remain the same.

Seriously? Are they really trying to say that we just need to make seats bigger because people are getting fatter? How about we work on getting people healthier so they fit in the existing seats that have seemed to work well for the last 25 years.

National Association of Fat Acceptance says it's unsafe to cram passengers.

This one I had to look up. Apparently there are associations for just about everything. They're actually called the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA). Their mission statement is as follows:

Founded in 1969, the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) is a non-profit civil rights organization dedicated to ending size discrimination in all of its forms. NAAFA's goal is to help build a society in which people of every size are accepted with dignity and equality in all aspects of life. NAAFA will pursue this goal through advocacy, public education, and support.

I'm all for excepting people as they are and I know I'm not in tip top shape, but seriously, an organization to make people accept fat people? While we aren't all skinny, I think we've pretty much established that it's not healthy to be fat. Your risk of various diseases (heart disease, diabetes, etc) goes up considerably when you're overweight. Rather than "accepting", we should all be working on getting healthy!

Here's what I find funny. The airlines claim that they are charging obese people for extra seats to help with the comfort of other passengers as well as safety. They say that if a plane needs to be evacuated, larger people crammed into a small seat may hinder other people trying to exit the plane. All I know is that you'd probably still have to crawl over the top of them, two seats or not. It seems to me that this is more a ploy to make an extra buck than a passenger safety issue. Don't get me wrong, I HATE it when someone who is a little bit larger seeps into my space on a plane (I swear, it always seems to happen to me too!), but I don't know that charging for an extra seat actually solves the problem!