I know these folks pretty well, and that's not the case for many of them. Most, even. It's not a question of having significant disposable income so they picked aviation as their hobby over boating and cars and vacation homes. Far from it.

Many still drive decades-old cars (that were practical and modest to begin with), are still rocking iPhone 7s or free Android phones on MVNOs and buying a new tablet for Foreflight is justifiable for safety, stay on old computers years past when any tech person would, dress plainly and inexpensively, only eat out for social reasons (usually aviation-related) and when they do it's somewhere inexpensive, and so on. That's how they save up to get out to Oshkosh.

Pilots are almost famously adept at squeezing more life out of a nickel than anyone. Aviation has its 1%'ers and that's who usually appears on the public's radar, but the incredible tempo of GA operations at even airports in high-income areas is done almost entirely by people who are decidedly middle class.

When a flying club arrives at a destination for the weekend, the official hotel is usually an inexpensive motel, not the Hilton/Marriott/Hyatt. (If they aren't camping.)

Many of the older pilots are still working well into their retirement strictly to be able to continue to fly. They don't remodel their bathroom, they put that towards their engine overhaul fund.

We have younger men and women electing to continue to live with relatives so they can pour everything into flying. They don't spend their non-work hours trying to advance in their career, they spend it studying for their next rating or planning their next flight.

Many work in aviation in decidedly blue-collar roles, because they love the field, financial consequences be damned.

These aren't people who would have the funds for vacation homes and fancy cars and boats if it wasn't an absolute top-priority passion to make it possible.

For every pilot in the club with a fancy plane and a new German car in the parking lot, there are 20 or 30 with ~50-year-old planes that was the cheapest thing they could find when they bought it, fly 15-20 hours a month, and scrimping and saving in nearly every aspect of life to be able to continue flying until their body forces them to stop. People in their 80s doing ~10 hours of cardio a week to stave off time, and people in their 20s who have already lost their medical because of a freak condition but are still showing up every month, desperate to stay a part of aviation however they can.

I would estimate 95+% of them have an income well under any FAANG technical employee. And this is in a place with a very high cost of living.

If this all sounds fiscally irresponsible and borderline stupid, it is. Non-pilots don't get pilots, they never have, and unless they're also bitten by the bug, they never will. Every time aviation comes up on HN many of the comments are Peak HN, as many non-pilots think they can extrapolate their domain expertise to one that's fundamentally almost orthogonal to their own.

So when someone (not you–further up the thread) with effectively no domain expertise casually suggests that the solution to a heavily taxed and inherently financially challenging industry is more taxes to mitigate its issues (which are likely far lower in global impact than some of their own hobbies and interests), it indicates an unfamiliarity with the subject one is proposing to fix. Which is something nobody here enjoys receiving from outsiders, and then we turn around and casually do it to others, ideally backed by the might of the federal government.