One of the industries most directly impacted by COVID-19 is the airline industry. As travel bans begin taking place, coupled with severe drops in people’s travel plans, airlines find themselves needing a rainy day fund. Good news! For the last decade, the airline industry has made billions in profits and I’m sure they’ve been creating jobs and making sure they are robust and healthy companies that can weather some terrible turn of events. Nope.
According to Bloomberg News, airlines in the United States spent about 96% of their “free cash flow” profits on stock buybacks! Highlights include: American Airlines spending $12.5 billion on buybacks, and United Airlines using 80% of their cash flow for buybacks! Sweet!
This fact has not gone unnoticed by many on the left, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who tweeted out:
Since the Trump administration finally began to acknowledge the magnitude of their failure a couple of weeks ago, the Republican administration has floated out useless ways to keep stock prices floating, while dragging their feet in providing economic relief to the millions of Americans soon to be out of work. The craven narrow-minded idea factory that is the Grand Old Party, has so far come up with tax cuts to big businesses and injecting trillions into the economy to make pretend that everything is going swimmingly.
The fact that the Trump administration did nothing to plan for these inevitabilities means they have nothing but half-baked scams. The first scam is to propose dolling out $1 trillion in taxpayer money to industries in need, like the airline industry and, of course … casinos and hotels. Of course, they can barely lift one of their money-grubbing fingers to help Americans losing jobs and wages and childcare. Nor are they willing to bail out the millions of small businesses, offering up “low interest loans” to small business with no other credit: meaning banks still make their money while most small businesses just dig deeper into debt.