At a time when Republicans in Congress need to generate enthusiasm ahead of the November midterm elections, the Trump administration is contemplating a move that would undermine conservative support. The president’s talk of a potential $500 million bailout for a budget airline struggling to emerge from bankruptcy might preserve Spirit Airlines, but it would deflate conservatives’ spirit (pun intended) at a critical juncture.
The president spoke last Thursday of “helping them [i.e., Spirit] out, meaning bailing them out, or buying it.” But the government took stakes in private-sector companies during the Obama administration. It didn’t work out well then, and it won’t work out well now.
Bad Policy
The list of reasons not to bail out Spirit stands as long as an airport runway. Start with the federal government’s $39 trillion in debt and counting. With the federal government running deficits approaching $2 trillion every year, and lawmakers not showing any signs of taking the actions needed to resolve Medicare and Social Security’s long-term shortfalls, why on Earth should taxpayers throw good money on top of bad to save an airline?
On top of the argument against bailing out airlines in general, this specific carrier doesn’t represent an economically critical business, let alone a company with national security implications. Last year, Spirit flew 3.5 percent of passenger miles domestically, which ranks it only eighth nationwide.
As it pared back services to stay afloat, Spirit has reportedly reduced its scheduled flights from 19,575 last May to an estimated 9,353 next month. Those numbers raise an obvious point: If Spirit could cut more than 10,000 flights in the past 12 months without causing a national calamity — or indeed without generating much notice at all — then the disappearance of its remaining 9,353 flights should not cause any major incident.
But Spirit’s liquidation wouldn’t necessarily lead to the disappearance of all its flights, as other airlines can, and likely would, buy its profitable routes and planes. Contra President Trump’s claim that “I’d love to be able to save those jobs,” letting Spirit go into liquidation would allow other companies to purchase and run its usable assets, including its personnel, without injecting taxpayer dollars into a zombie company to keep it afloat.
Awful Politics
Conservatives have equally solid political reasons to oppose a Spirit bailout. We know how Republicans would react if the political roles were reversed. When President Obama gave bailout funds to American automakers, conservatives derided the actions of “Government Motors” for years, and rightly so.
Moreover, the White House appears not to remember the trap that George W. Bush laid for congressional Republicans 18 years ago: the trap of TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Coming in the fall of a presidential election year, the Wall Street bailout helped transform a middling-to-bad election cycle for congressional Republicans into a wipeout. Republicans’ catastrophic defeat in November 2008 gave Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama the margins they needed to ram Obamacare down the throats of Congress and a skeptical American people.
With families still struggling under persistent inflation, using more taxpayer dollars to bail out poor choices by airline executives could engender a similar public outrage as TARP among the electorate. Unless Trump has a political death wish, he would steer well clear of this type of golden giveaway.
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