Dem
47
GOP
53
There was no government handout or last-minute investor, and so cut-rate carrier Spirit Airlines ceased operations this weekend. The leadership of the airline dug itself a hole that would have been tough to climb out of. And then higher fuel prices, caused by the Iran War, finished Spirit off.
The official announcement came in the middle of the night on Saturday; that timing was deliberate so that the airline could make sure no planes were in the air, and that all staffers who were mid-trip had accommodations. It was also in time for members of the Trump administration to go on the various weekend news programs and blame Joe Biden for Spirit's collapse.
Is Biden actually to blame? The answer is... complicated. First of all, if anything, it's actually the Biden-era Department of Justice that is to blame, since the DoJ handles antitrust matters. Biden was not personally involved; Trumpers seem to forget that many presidents—say, 43/45 of them (95%)—do not involve themselves in DoJ business. Anyhow, Spirit tried to save itself a few years ago by merging with JetBlue, another low-cost carrier, and the move was successfully blocked by the Biden-era DoJ.
The position that the Biden-era folks took was that consolidation of airlines has generally hurt consumers much more than it's helped them, and that Spirit—as the lowest-cost airline of them all—was playing a particularly key role in keeping prices down. A federal judge agreed, and so the merger got the kibosh.
So, the ideal was a world in which Spirit still exists, and is competing with JetBlue and other low-cost carriers. But, failing that, a world with a JetBlue/Spirit merger, where all those jobs lost this weekend were saved, is better than what we ended up with, right? Well... maybe. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and nobody could be sure 3 years ago that this would be the outcome. In particular, they could not predict a dramatic spike in fuel prices caused by an ill-conceived war in the Middle East. Beyond that, however, Spirit's problems were great enough that many analysts are convinced that, at best, a big price hike would have been necessary. And, at worst, Spirit might have dragged JetBlue with it, into the abyss.
In any case, what's important for our purposes is that the White House is trying mightily to pass the buck here. That is a bright, red flashing light that makes clear that the administration is scared. And what they are undoubtedly scared about is that airplane flights are going to get noticeably more expensive, for at least three reasons. First, the loss of Spirit means that the downward pressure on pricing that airline was exerting is no longer in effect. Every airline can increase prices some, because they are no longer competing against those lower price tags. Second, every airline is going to be affected by the higher fuel prices that doomed Spirit, and the problem figures to get worse before it gets better. Third, summer is travel season, and higher demand for seats means higher prices.
So, the battle plan here is that when people start carping about (and, probably, pollsters start asking about) higher prices, the administration will have laid the groundwork to say, "Thanks, Biden." We are skeptical that this will work. First, there's a certain expiry for blaming economic problems on the previous president, and we may have passed that date already. Second, we very seriously doubt people will say, "Damn! My ticket to Miami was $1,000! If only Biden hadn't blocked that Spirit-JetBlue merger." We think it much more likely they will say, "Damn! My ticket to Miami was $1,000! It's gotta be fuel prices from the Iran mess, kind of like how the price for gas in my car is way up, too." For those of you keeping score at home, the national average gas price was $4.54/gal. this morning.
And let us also address one other thing we think is of interest. For a brief while, Trump flirted with the idea of the government taking over Spirit. Who knows how serious that was; in any event, obviously it didn't happen. And at least part of the problem with these things is that the impatient, no-impulse-control President simply doesn't have the patience to make an argument for his policy choices, and then to slowly build public support for those choices. It's always "bull in a china shop" with him.
Now, let us imagine Trump had made a case for a temporary or permanent government takeover. Could he maybe have pulled it off? We think that someone like Franklin D. Roosevelt or Lyndon B. Johnson or Ronald Reagan could have done it, even though the U.S. government operating its own airline would be a direct assault upon several sacred cows. We do doubt Trump cold have done it, though. He's nowhere near the salesman those presidents were, and he's also got no credibility on these kinds of projects at this point. No matter how good his arguments might be, the majority are going to say, "OK, he's the king of grifters. So, what's the how-does-this-benefit-Trump angle here?"
This is all just idle speculation. We'll never know what would happen if Trump made an honest effort to sell his policies to the public, because he never does so. (Z)