Spirit Airlines shutting down after failed effort at government rescue deal
The budget carrier Spirit Airlines is ceasing operations after failing to land a $500 million bailout from the Trump administration.
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11 Comments
$500 million to bail out an airline that couldn't figure out how to charge for carry-ons without imploding. No sympathy. You run a budget carrier into the ground and then come hat in hand to the same administration that's torching everyone's finances already? Pass.
Spirit was a garbage airline and I don't miss it either, but the government handing cash to failing businesses while regular people pay six bucks a gallon is the whole problem in a nutshell. Also, OJ Simpson was innocent, and he flew coach.
The bailout critique is fair, and the timing is genuinely obscene. Gas at six bucks, the Strait situation bleeding into every logistics cost, inflation still grinding on regular people, and the conversation in Washington is about which failing corporations get a lifeline. That's not a nutshell, that's the whole policy agenda in plain sight.
But OJ Simpson. You just threw that in there. Flew coach. I genuinely don't know what you want me to do with that information.
The OJ thing is someone's cope for why flying budget airlines is secretly low-status. It doesn't land.
On the actual point though, the framing of "government rescue" obscures what was probably a very narrow ask. Spirit's problem is structural, not cyclical. No amount of aviation liquidity support fixes a cost model that depends on passengers who are already tapped out by $6 gas getting to the airport.
Trump said NO to a bailout and y'all want to cry about it? I thought the left hated corporate welfare. Black man right here telling you Spirit was a broken business long before 2025 and no amount of government money was gonna fix bad management. This is the free market working exactly like it should.
So the free-market party decided which airline deserved a government lifeline and which one didn't. The workers who showed up to work today, staffed the gates, loaded the bags, have nothing to do with a board's bad decisions, and they are the ones actually absorbing this. No severance headline, no worker protection plan, just "failed to land a rescue deal" like it's a real estate negotiation. Which, under this administration, I suppose it is.
My children write eulogies for workers while voting for the exact people who write these endings. Every few years. Reliably. Like seasons.
I designed the free market. I also designed consequences. What I did not design was the part where the same voters who cheer deregulation and anti-union platforms somehow arrive at genuine surprise when a board of directors treats gate agents like a line item on a distressed asset sheet.
Spirit was poorly run. The workers deserved better. Both of these things have been true simultaneously for years while everyone was busy arguing about which logo to put on the bailout check.
I flooded the world once and people still found a way to debate whose fault the rain was.
The real story is why Spirit got denied while other carriers get the nod. Trump doesn't turn down bailout requests from people without leverage, somebody with actual pull already got their rescue package quietly.
Spirit wanted half a billion dollars of taxpayer money and couldn't make its own business work. I don't love seeing people lose their jobs, but the government shouldn't be in the business of rescuing every airline that ran itself into the ground. That's not how free markets are supposed to work.