Drinking lead can damage people’s brains, but Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach opposes a plan to remove lead water pipes.
…
In their letter, the attorneys general wrote, “[The plan] sets an almost impossible timeline, will cost billions and will infringe on the rights of the States and their residents – all for benefits that may be entirely speculative.”
Kobach repeated this nearly verbatim in a March 7 post on X (formerly Twitter).
Buttigieg responded by writing, “The benefit of not being lead poisoned is not speculative. It is enormous. And because lead poisoning leads to irreversible cognitive harm, massive economic loss, and even higher crime rates, this work represents one of the best returns on public investment ever observed.”
I can’t speak to the rest of your post, but if you own and maintain even the smallest Cessna for personal use, you are rich to me, and you are rich to anyone I’ve ever known personally, and you are rich to most people. That’s like saying owning a Ferrari doesn’t make you rich.
Partial and group ownership is incredibly common now because everything is so expensive. I’m making ~$60k and ‘own’ 1/20th of a plane (Cessna 177) that none of us could reasonably afford alone. Admittedly that’s not struggling, but it’s not a ton of money in my part of the country either. It’s just prioritizing spending on getting to fly instead of other hobbies.
Most flight instructors / people going for the airlines are in similar partnerships or at a flight school using those small planes to eventually get enough hours to go to the airlines. They’re usually making less than I am.
OK that’s fair, I was ignorant of that. But is this the case for most small planes? (Maybe it is, I truly don’t know.)
Middle class != rich.
I’ve met almost no one who owns a brand new Cessna Skyhawk as a “I’m a private pilot, it’s mine. I go flying on pretty weekends in it.” Because yeah, the aviation equivalent of a Toyota Corolla costs nearly half a million dollars new. Pretty much all new Skyhawks go to school fleets, the likes of ATC or ERAU.
Older used aircraft can be had for considerably less; a small airplane is within the reach of a middle class income. You might own a plane instead of a Corvette or a Winnebago, you might buy a plane instead of remodeling your house, but its within reach if it’s your ‘thing.’
A lot of the aircraft owners I’ve met are instructors or other aviation professionals, owning an aircraft is a business expense at that point.
Then you get into fractional ownership or flying clubs, where say, you and four other guys you met in flight school buy an airplane together and split the expenses, and share a Google calendar of who gets the plane when. Membership dues-based flying clubs are fairly popular, because they can offer lots of people ownership-like access to a fleet of various planes. A large local club to me is the Wings of Carolina, which when I last checked in owned two C-152s, two Piper Cherokees, two Mooney Bravos and a twin of some kind, and the individual membership dues were less than the ownership cost of one of those 152s.
The funniest part to me is how many airplanes seem to be owned by no one. The number of airplanes tied down to the typical GA ramp with flat tires and flaking paint is…interesting to me.
Hmm interesting thank you very much for the additional info!
Nah owning a Ferrari or airplane doesn’t mean you’re rich. Keeping one running in the long term probably does, more so.
I can tell you that at least some of the people you see driving around in Ferraris just won a six figure personal injury settlement and spent all the money in the course of days or weeks. I would say even if you had one million in the bank, that isn’t rich. It will certainly provide a great deal of comfort and options, or one Ferrari and some options, and will open some doors, but it’s much closer to abject poverty and homelessness than having like a $1 billion, or even $100,000,000.