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Comment by xkvd | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean by "privatize the profits" here? Are you ignoring taxation?

One way to view the government's role here is that it shifts around externalities to achieve efficiency. You can put cap-and-trade restrictions to absorb negative externalize in high-pollution industries and redistribute that to consumer/producer markets that suffer from the pollution.

You can probably apply a similar piece of reasoning across time. Government can tax industries during booms and then redistribute that during busts.

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>What do you mean by "privatize the profits" here?

CEO's we getting their fat bonuses (tied to share prices) for years, inflating said prices with buybacks, and now, when shit hit the fan, they are dumping half-bankrupt companies to the public?

Airlines are a grey government agency. If they had to pay the true cost of things like air traffic control, FAA administration and safety regulation, or health costs due to pollution, to say nothing of the non-the-first-time-fat cash payment they just got on top of the huge fact that they are paying little to negative tax rates (all effectively government subsidies of their operations) then not a single airline would be in operation today. The industry exists at the price it exists only with heavy support from the government.

The cost of an airline ticket has fallen by around 50% since the 1980s; clearly the industry can exist and still pay for the services/infrastructure it consumes.

What you say is reasonable in theory, but grossly ignores the actual history. E.g., the 2017 tax cut was an enormous giveway to corporations and the rich: https://qz.com/1769421/trumps-tax-cuts-and-jobs-act-shows-po...

And a lot of that money is being borrowed, so it's even worse than it seems at first blush. Not only are the rich getting richer, but we'll all have to pay for it eventually. So recent history is the government doing the opposite: they were giving away money during the boom, making it harder to do countercyclical interventions in a crisis. And this from the supposedly fiscal conservative party.

> What do you mean by "privatize the profits" here? Are you ignoring taxation?

Are you (excuse my french) fucking kidding me?

Source: https://itep.org/notadime/ (dollars in millions)

     Company (U.S.)   ~ Income ~ Federal Tax ~ Effective Tax Rate
     Alaska Air Group ~ $576   ~ $-5         ~ -1%
     Delta Air Lines  ~ $5,073 ~ $-187       ~ -4%
     JetBlue Airways  ~ $219   ~ $-60        ~ -27%

And from this source: https://itep.org/covid-19-is-no-excuse-for-airline-industry-...

The most taxes paid was by Southwest, at 21.4% ... Which is a 60% of my personal tax! When can I get personal tax rates like that???

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