Remote workers should be taxed for privilege

[Frank Cox]

A semi-regular customer of mine (whose parents used to bring him to the show when he was little) has always been interested in planes. He got his pilot's license as soon as he could when he was a teenager, got a commercial license before he was out of school, did some kind of aerial photography for a while, and got a job as a northern bush pilot right out of high school. Over the next few years he got promoted and moved around and now he's a.... captain? Pilot on one of the big passenger jets for a major airline.

Now he's laid off and has no idea when or if he'll ever be back to work. Which has got to be tough since he can't be thirty years old yet.

[Mike Blakesley]

Airlines will be among the hardest hit by this (especially as the pay and conditions for their highest skilled workers - pilots, engineers, and logistics professionals - was already in decline before C19 happened), but cruising, hospitality, live events, and "non-essential" retail will also have problems.

I feel really bad for the cruise industry. To me they will have one of the hardest times rebounding. Finding people to work the crews might be difficult as well, given the nature of that job. When you are on a ship, you have absolutely zero chance of maintaining really strict social distancing -- the elevators get full, the buffets are crowded, the pools, the bars, the clubs, EVERYTHING. Even the hallways. And when you get on that ship you are ON THAT SHIP for the entire duration, unlike a plane where it's at most, a few hours and you're off. And those ships are budgeted and designed to have a full complement of bodies onboard... if they have to run at half capacity or whatever, I wonder if they can be profitable without jacking the prices way up.

We've taken 4 cruises over the past 20 years and I can tell you, I have zero desire to go on another one right now, and when we do go, it will probably have to be a Disney cruise given their expertise at ..... well just about everything. They put on a nice cruise. I rarely have much sympathy for them, but just before this mess started they ordered two new ships which are being built at this moment... a couple of billion dollars apiece. That's gotta keep some folks in the executive offices awake at night.

[Leo Enticknap]

Now he's laid off and has no idea when or if he'll ever be back to work. Which has got to be tough since he can't be thirty years old yet.

It's tough, but 30 is young enough to do a complete career change if you are motivated enough and think it through carefully. The biggest (well, really, only - Loma Linda is effectively a company town) employer in my home city is a large nonprofit hospital with a medical school attached to it. I would guess that many if not most of the students that go through it are in their 30s, and a significant proportion are in their late 30s, after having worked in a surprising range of businesses before then. Making that sort of jump is much, much tougher if you're in your 40s or later. My father-in-law went to dental school in his early 40s after having previously been a schoolteacher (and emigrated from Toronto to Southern California to do so!), but I don't know anyone else who changed careers so radically that late in life.

Even if your friend has made captain, he'll likely be competing with others that have decades more seniority once air travel starts to revive, so waiting this out could prove a challenge.

We went on a short cruise (from LA to Ensenada) just over a year ago, to celebrate my in-laws' 50th wedding anniversary. The decision to do it was made elsewhere in the family, rather than by us. The whole experience seems to have been designed for people two decades younger, and it's not something we have any desire to repeat. The ship we went on was scrapped in September, along with about a dozen others (it looked pretty 1990s when we were on it, so I'm not surprised that it was one of the first to go).

[Harold Hallikainen]

A semi-regular customer of mine (whose parents used to bring him to the show when he was little) has always been interested in planes. He got his pilot's license as soon as he could when he was a teenager, got a commercial license before he was out of school, did some kind of aerial photography for a while, and got a job as a northern bush pilot right out of high school. Over the next few years he got promoted and moved around and now he's a.... captain? Pilot on one of the big passenger jets for a major airline.

Now he's laid off and has no idea when or if he'll ever be back to work. Which has got to be tough since he can't be thirty years old yet.

I was recently talking with a pilot on 40 meter CW. He was in Kentucky and had left the airline industry as a pilot early this year and is now flying for UPS. He has a lot of unemployed friends in the airline industry.

Harold

[Carsten Kurz]

Well, so much for 'Deutsche Bank AGs research arm' - the german government as a matter of fact now decided towards tax deductions for home office workers.