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Comment by battery_cowboy | Hacker News Reader

Fuck em, they flag in other countries so they don't pay taxes, but also because they can treat employees like slaves, pollute using bunker fuel, and generally fuck over the world.

Fuck em.

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Airlines also pollute and dodge taxes. But love them or hate them, it's hard to argue that airlines don't play a critical role. The broader economy would suffer badly if they were to fail.

Cruise ships, however, do not. They are purely recreational and the economy would not fall apart if they were to go. They also share some of the blame for spreading Covid-19 in the first place!

> The broader economy would suffer badly if they were to fail

Why? The planes are not going anywhere. If airlines fail, someone will be able to buy them at a discount. They will need to hire pilots and cabin crews. Shareholders in airlines will be hit - as it should be.

That's even more true with cruise ships. That industry will be effectively bailed out one way or the other, the other is banks eating the losses after bankruptcy and new companies starting out with lower debt after taking over the assets at firesale prices.

But that only strengthens the point of the article: the optics of an actual bailout would be so much worse and the outcome would only really differ for shareholders.

It’s not even banks, they don’t lend at those scales, it’s bondholders. Let them take their lumps. If investors wanted government guarantees they could have bought sovereign debt instead.

Are the regular capital markets closed to the airlines? Even after all the turmoil Delta’s market cap is more than $14B. Just as they bought back shares in good times, now that they have a need for cash on hand they can sell new shares.

At least you could argue [citation needed] that the airlines play a bigger role in the US economy than cruise ships. I mean their intent is to ferry people (and their money) away from the US, both in the fare (which goes to tax havens and rich people's pockets) and the money people spend in foreign tourist areas.

The airline equivalent of the cruise lines would be large foreign carriers, which happen to fly to the US. It would be obvious madness for the US Govt. to give anything at all to Emirates or Ethiopian, for instance.

Whereas Delta & friends have a large footprint in the US, lots of jobs, lots of purely US service. Still not obvious whether they deserve help, but they are clearly very different organizations.

it's hard to argue that airlines don't play a critical role.

What critical industry will suffer if air travel suddenly becomes much more rare?

Cruises!

(I'm only pretending to have missed the "critical" before "industry", of course you are completely right)

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