Bail Out As Gravy

 During the Catastrophe of 2008/2009 the federal government sent massive bailout payments to the major banks; they were the ones who got us into the catastrophe, so they must be the ones who can get us out - that must have been the thinking.

The only widely documented result of that massive cash transfer is that the amount of the payments matched up remarkably closely to the massive bonuses those threatened banks paid to the jackals that had brought the system to its knees.

Today those jackals, and the banks that employ them wax fat, and probably, dumb and happy and are poised to pull off a similar scam as opportunity allows.

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In the run up to the great pandemic lockdown of 2020/2021 the major airlines waxed fat.

I don't know if they were dumb and happy.

I will let you decide about that.

But they were doing so well that they accumulated about $65 billion in prosperity.

That should have been a nice safety pad against the inevitable rainy day.

That rainy day came in 2020/2021 when nobody could leave their houses, let alone get on a plane.

Those airlines were uniformly replete with economic rue: they had spent their safety pad on stock buybacks, not kept it for a rainy day.

So suddenly they were faced with massive ongoing costs and a massive lack of offsetting revenue.

Most of the hard dollar category of those costs were payroll - people, employees and their troublesome related costs - health insurance, IRAs and the like.

"We don't have any money; we are going to have to fire everybody; we can't keep them unless we get $55 billion" said the airlines to no one in particular.

Luckily the Government, in particular, was listening and it shoveled out $55 billion to the airlines so they could retain their people.

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This 4th of July holiday has brought the airlines to their knees.

The reason they give: "not enough people to serve the demand".

I thought, just as previously with the banks, so recently with the airlines, we the people had disgorged massive amounts of money to the airlines so they could keep their people.

At the point of that payment, as bad as the service was, the airlines were at least functioning and getting through holiday surges in demand with an acceptable, if sometimes painful, service level.

They must have had nearly enough people.

Now they don't.

What did they do with that $55 billion?