The Wall Street Journal has changed our lives here in the apartment district of Daley City. Sure, it slants so far right that the listing of the Titanic looks minor by comparison, but if you know anything at all you can fill in the missing facts and make every story a true story. For example: speaking of airlines' woes just now, Wally points out that, globally, not every carrier is doing poorly--just the US ones, really. Big puzzle, that. Wally says the causes are the weak dollar (foreign airlines can buy oil--pegged to the dollar, natch--for less with their strong currencies), high oil prices, competition in the US market (please--this is so wrong it's almost circled back around to being right), and fewer international routes for US airlines.
Wrong, WSJ! You suck at this. High oil prices there may be, but that isn't the big problem (a lack of planning and lack of understanding of simple economic principles is). International routes? Que? Like railroads (and every single fucking carrier since then), I suspect that airlines do not make much on international routes compared to short, domestic routes. If a seat from Omaha to St. Louis is going for $99 each way, and a seat from LA to Tokyo is going for $379 each way (made up numbers), then which one makes more money? Think about turning over tables in a restaurant...do you want the big party that's going to spend $400 but stay for 3 hours, or do you want a series of diners that each spend $40 and then get the hell out? I ain't no economiste (it's French! (is it?)), but I want the short routes.
And really, when you look at the airlines doing well, you see some common traits. Foresight. Pre-purchased fuel. Limited expansion. Oh, and that other thing:
oversight!
US airlines are deregulated.
The result is that a bunch of assholes, without any accountability, slash their prices to the bone to attract passengers to unprofitable routes. And fuck them. If the seat needs to be sold for $300 in order to break even, charge $301. Do not let people fly for $99. If the US government were not handing out piles of cash to every retarded airline that went bankrupt for the 4th or 5th or 12th time, then there would be some reason in the American airline industry. Instead, given free rein, they have perfected the most idiotic pricing structure of any industry ever in history (as an historian, I feel I can say that with 100% accuracy and, a la Carlo Ginzburg, it's up to you to prove me wrong. Until then, it's a goddamn fact!). Our government lets these dumb fucks slit their own throats in competition with each other (and it needs to be pointed out, competition solely for the sake of competition; they are not growing the industry, or serving the passengers, or preserving the viability of airline travel. Rather, like GM and Ford are wont to do, they are striking at each other simply to strike.). Only when the airlines run themselves into the ground does the government step in "for the good of the consumers" and hand over another pile of money.
Regulation is the key to airlines' profitability. Either the airline needs to be accountable to shareholders, or the government, or the public. US carriers, with the exception of Southwest, are not accountable to anyone. This is not a market-driven problem so much as a crisis created by right wing ideology that holds all regulation in contempt. Dig up Ronald Reagan and sell his skeleton to the Chinese; distribute the proceeds in the form of free plane tickets for all Americans! That makes as much sense as allowing airlines to run themselves. I think we've seen the results for long enough--the deregulation experiment is a horrid failure and we've all paid, literally, a high price for a conservative pie-in-the-sky jerkoff session come to life.
