Oh No! Zohran Mamdani's Going To Tax All Of Our Private Jets That We Definitely Own!

What a tragedy for practically all Americans!

May 19, 2026

As if it were not costly enough these days, thanks to the War But Also Not A War on Iran, for the average American to fill up the tanks of their private jets, Fortune magazine reported this weekend that Evil Socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants to start taxing them as well.

If you own an apartment in New York and don’t live there full-time, you’re taxed. If your heirs inherit assets in New York, they’re taxed at thresholds that now reach the upper middle class. The logical extension of this trajectory — and the question the entire private aviation industry should be asking — is: what about the $70 million jet you landed at Teterboro this morning?

Well, thank goodness someone is asking the important questions. What about our $70 million jets, indeed?

Now, technically, nothing has been proposed yet, but supposedly the Mayor is considering a surcharge or tax on private jets that operate in and around the New York City metro area, as part of his nefarious plan to “tax the rich” just to make life more affordable for all of the city’s non-private-jet-owning residents. And Greg Raiff, CEO of Elevate Aviation Group and author of the aforementioned Fortune article, is very, very concerned about that.

“The question isn’t just whether a tax gets proposed,” he writes, “it’s whether the mechanism to implement it already exists. In many cases, it does.”

The most realistic scenario, he claims, would be for Mamdani to institute a per-landing surcharge on all planes landing in the area.

This targets wealth directly and raises revenue for the Port Authority which can be used for other poltical [sic] objectives. Whether those objectives are to subsidize public transportation for commuters without requiring Albany to pass new legislation, Mamdani has claimed he wants to make all bus transportation free.

Oh, sure, he wants to make it free for the peasants to ride the bus to their jobs, but to charge people extra if they just want to fly their private jet into the city for a reservation at Per Se? How is that fair?

Thankfully, for all of us, Raiff has some hot tips to get us prepared for the forthcoming PJpocalypse.

Charter, don’t own — for New York trips. Ownership-based taxes require an owner. Charter clients flying on a per-trip basis have structural insulation from registration, basing, and ownership surcharges.
Move your aircraft out of New York. If your aircraft is currently based or registered in New York State, that is your single largest exposure point. Florida, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire are the most common rebasing destinations. Act before the rule is written.
Know your airports. Teterboro (TEB) remains operationally superior but are Port Authority facilities and therefore in scope. Westchester (HPN) is the most insulated option available.
Watch Albany, not just City Hall. Mamdani’s ability to implement airport-level taxes requires coordination with Governor Hochul and the New Jersey governor’s office. Monitor state budget negotiations closely.

Well that is certainly very helpful and applicable to all of our respective lifestyles.

I mean, I could assume that no one here has a private jet, but I’d also like to assume that Lisa Vanderpump is a regular reader of my work and also that someday we will hang out and be best friends and she will let me pet her swans, because I am not afraid to dream.

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Sure. Private jets are pretty universally considered, in terms of proportion, the most environmentally damaging form of transportation — but do we truly expect our most elite citizens, people worth, on average, over $190 million, to fly commercial?

What is next? Asking them to take a couch scooter to the Hamptons?

Some might say, you know, there are only about 15,000 private jets in the whole country that are owned by individuals or businesses, and a small tax on these could very well make life easier for millions of New Yorkers, but we must consider that such a tax could very well discourage those millions of New Yorkers from working hard so that they might someday own their own private jet. Everyone might just stop working altogether! Unless, you know, they have children to feed or rent to pay or some other priority like that.

Why tax something that practically no one needs to own when you could instead institute austerity measures for people who are already just barely getting by? I mean, they’re already used to it! Isn’t it better to suggest that they live off of cereal and ramen and work 12 jobs just to be able to live in a room the size of a closet than to ask people who own $70 million jets and are used to #luxury to pay a small surcharge for flying into the city? Such people are very delicate and sensitive and not used to making that kind of sacrifice. After all — it might not hurt their wallets all that much, but it could very well hurt their feelings.

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