Hi Richard:
All the best to you and yours for Christmas and the New Year.
I see your front runner to replace Trent Lott is Bill Frist, seems he is an airplane lover. If he wins why not get all the Flight Schools to lobby him for tax reductions on "all" flight training.
Another suggestion you may ponder is lobbying the Insurance underwriters to give less expensive insurance to Flight Training businesses who can demonstrate that their quality of flight training will reduce insurance pay outs through less accidents.
The key to this is better Instruction and that can only be acheived through offering incentives to better instructors.
There are only two real incentives that I know of and one is money, the other one is only legal in Nevada as far as I know....but then all your employees would have to be female.
This pay for instructors is in my opinion the most serious problem in Aviation, always has been.
Anyhow you give this some thought as I think it is doable with the right game plan.
Chuck Ellsworth.