Category: reason

Regal Cinemas announced recently that it will temporarily close all 536 of its U.S. locations as the COVID-19 pandemic rages on and continues to keep customers away. This move will affect approximately 40,000 employees across the country. And yet, nobody in Congress is talking about a bailout for Regal.

Now compare that with the airline industry.

Congress passed a $50 billion bailout for the airlines in April of this year, with $25 billion in subsidized loans and $25 billion meant to keep most airline workers employed until the end of September. As predicted, since consumers weren’t ready to fly yet, this taxpayer-funded Band-Aid only postponed the inevitable. American Airlines and United Airlines just furloughed 32,000 employees. Yet, in this case, most legislators—from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) to a large number of Senate Republicans to President Donald Trump—want to bail out the industry.

We’re told that a new injection of taxpayers’ money is about saving airline jobs. But it’s hard to believe that this is really what it’s all about. As mentioned above, nobody is talking about bailing out Regal to save its workers. Moreover, as my colleague Gary Leff and I show in new research published by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, the math doesn’t add up to support the arguments that a second airline bailout is about the workers. If the bailout were truly to support upwards of 35,000 airline employees for six months, assuming roughly $50,000 per worker paid out over that period (i.e., $100,000 annually), the bailout would only be around $1.7 billion, not the $25 billion package that Congress is talking about. What’s more, if the bailout is indeed another $25 billion for 35,000 jobs, that would cost taxpayers $715,000 per job saved—for only six months.

Bolstering the claim that this isn’t about protecting jobs, much of the payroll support would give money to airlines that aren’t furloughing workers to begin with. These points should put an end to the argument that the bailout is to prevent furloughs. But it doesn’t. Airline representatives have argued that the bailout would not only be beneficial to freshly furloughed workers but also protect against the termination of workers currently on leave. Don’t buy it.

First, there’s no indication that airlines plan to furlough those workers. If they did, they would have had to notify them 60 days in advance of the furloughs, which they have not. Second, if the concern is that airlines might make additional, yet-to-be-announced furloughs, then that’s an even bigger argument against payroll support. It suggests that the industry isn’t expecting to do better anytime soon if they feel the need to furlough the on-leave workers who aren’t costing them a dime.

As I said, saving jobs isn’t the primary reason for this bailout. It never is.

It’s also worth noting that some companies are taking a different approach to retaining their employees. For instance, Southwest is asking its labor unions to accept pay cuts to prevent furloughs and layoffs through the end of next year. Others, such as Singapore Airlines, have done the same. Airlines also have access to capital markets and have many durable assets that they can sell or use as collateral to secure additional financing, even during a crisis. And even without selling these lucrative assets, airlines can also turn to their co-brand credit-card-issuing partners for liquidity like they have during past financial challenges.

Sadly, as long as demand for air travel remains so deflated, there’s no way to avoid airlines restructuring and slimming down their payroll. Subsidies provided through the cover of payroll programs aren’t necessary to protect an industry that could restructure through bankruptcy. Airline bankruptcies aren’t the equivalent of an airline collapse. They can continue to fly safely during the process where a judge imposes a stay on creditors’ claims and gives the airlines breathing room until consumers are ready to come back.
Importantly, the bankruptcy process is fair. It shifts the cost of this crisis onto those airline investors who make good returns during good times and should shoulder the decreased value of their investments, instead of taxpayers. Without a bailout, airlines won’t just be flying the friendly sky, but the fairer sky—for all taxpayers, including Regal employees.

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During Wednesday night’s debate, Vice President Mike Pence kept saying that a Biden-Harris administration would “ban fracking.” Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) insisted that claim was not correct. In fact, Democratic presidential candidate Biden has consistently said that he would not ban fracking and other fossil fuel exploration and exploitation on private lands. His administration, however, would ban fracking on federally owned lands. Natural gas production from onshore federal lands currently constitutes less than 10 percent of production in the United States.

Pence also noted that U.S. carbon dioxide emissions are down. That is true, but the chief reason that U.S. carbon dioxide emissions are down is because cheap natural gas (produced from largely from fracking) has outcompeted coal. If President Donald Trump had kept his promise to revive “beautiful clean coal,” then U.S. carbon dioxide emissions would not be falling.

Debate moderator Susan Page asked Vice President Pence, “Do you believe, as the scientific community has concluded, that man-made climate change has made wildfires bigger, hotter, and more deadly and has made hurricanes wetter, slower and more damaging?” He responded, “With regard to climate change, the climate is changing. The issue is what is the cause and what do we do about it? President Trump has made it clear that we will continue to listen to the science.”

The science suggests that man-made climate change is indeed making wildfires in the western U.S. worse. As I recently reported, researchers find that climate change is contributing to the rising temperatures and lengthier droughts that are fueling the increasing extent of wildfires in California. In addition, evidence is accumulating that as a result of rising greenhouse gases hurricanes are slowing down and getting wetter as well.

Pence is right that the issue is what do we do about climate change, but he offered no answer to that question other than a vague reference to “innovation” and to a shift in power generation from coal to natural gas for which the Trump administration can claim little credit. Biden’s proposal to ban fracking on federal lands would, in fact, slow that shift. But it’s false to say he would ban fracking altogether.

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Tonight’s vice presidential debate yielded little clarity, with Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) and Vice President Mike Pence skirting question after question. One exception: Harris’s promise that a Biden-Harris administration would decriminalize marijuana. 

“We will decriminalize marijuana and we will expunge the records of those who have been convicted of marijuana,” she said.

The position is the strongest any major-party candidate for president or vice president has taken to date on the issue in such a prominent venue.

Though former Vice President Biden has historically resisted calls to ease up on drug enforcement, he seems to have turned on the issue this election cycle, telling supporters in May 2019 that “nobody should be in jail for smoking marijuana.” Most recently, Harris reiterated the position in a virtual town hall on September 14, assuring viewers that a Biden-Harris administration would “end incarceration for drug use alone.” Campaign aide Symone Sanders said the same in an August 29 interview on MSNBC.

It’s a rather recent pivot for Harris as well. While attempting to clinch the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, the senator campaigned on legalizing cannabis, telling radio host Charlamagne tha God that the drug “brings a lot of people joy.”

As Reason‘s Nick Gillespie points out, however, it wasn’t always that way: “When Harris was running for reelection as San Francisco’s district attorney, she boasted that she ‘closed legal loopholes that were allowing drug dealers to escape prosecution’ and bragged that she ‘increased convictions of drug dealers from 56% in 2003 to 74% in 2006,'” he writes. “But in the Senate, Harris has been an outspoken proponent of marijuana reform and rarely misses an opportunity to highlight her desire to legalize weed (and, on occasion, her past experience smoking it).”

And as Elizabeth Nolan Brown has reported, Harris “has a long record of pushing illiberal policies,” including shuttering Backpage.com, threatening to prosecute parents with truant children, and harshly enforcing drug laws. “In an op-ed [in 2005] in the San Francisco Examiner, Harris complained that people had ‘learned how to manipulate the system—by simply claiming to be addicts,'” writes Brown. “She proposed barring anyone who had previously sold any quantity of any drug from the Drug Court, and the chance it offered for lesser sentencing, even if the current arrest was for mere possession.”

What we heard on the stage tonight appears to be a reconciliation with Biden’s position: Harris dropped legalize and moved to decriminalize. Very little detail is available about the proposed reforms, but this would presumably mean selling marijuana will remain illegal, though users would avoid prosecution if caught with the drug—an important step in the right direction.

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Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) was asked directly whether she and Vice President Joe Biden would try to expand or pack the Supreme Court if they were elected—and she did not give an answer.

The question came not from moderator Susan Page, but from Vice President Mike Pence. In response to a sparring session about whether President Donald Trump should continue with the nominating process for Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court or wait until after the election, Pence took the moment to ask Harris for a straight answer.

She did not give one. Instead she gave a history lesson about how President Abraham Lincoln once declined to nominate a Supreme Court justice prior to the election, insisting that the American people should choose the president first.

“Joe and I are very clear,” she said. “The American people are voting right now. It should be their decision about who will serve on this most important body for a lifetime.”

Moderator Susan Page attempted to move on, not noting that Harris hadn’t answered the question. Pence then broke in to point out that because Americans are voting right now, they should know if Harris and Biden “are going to pack the Supreme Court if [they] don’t get their way with this nomination.”

Pence pointed out that she had given a non-answer, as has Biden previously. Harris insisted that she was trying to give him an answer right now.

“Let’s talk about packing the court then,” she said. And then she continued to not talk about expanding the Supreme Court. Instead she talked about the Trump administration’s filling of open federal court seats with “people who are purely ideological, viewed by professional legal organizations to have been not competent or substandard.” She also noted (accurately) that Trump had not nominated a single black person to a court seat.

And then Page simply moved on. Pence jumped in as Page started a new question: “I just want the record to reflect she never answered the question.”

It was an odd exchange. Harris confidently acted throughout as though she was going to answer the question, but she never did. Biden similarly declined to answer the question when he was asked at the last debate.

Americans still do not know whether the people on the Democratic ticket plan to pack or expand the Court, leaving voters to make assumptions based on their refusal to respond clearly.

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“The vice president has two duties,” then-Sen. John McCain quipped in 2000 to explain why he wasn’t interested in the second-in-command spot on George W. Bush’s ticket. “One is to inquire daily as to the health of the president, and the other is to attend the funerals of Third World dictators.”

It’s pretty obvious that neither Vice President Mike Pence nor Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) are competing for the chance to attend dictators’ funerals.

That means that there was really only one important question asked at Wednesday night’s vice presidential debate—a question that moderator Susan Page put to both would-be veeps within the first 20 minutes of the contest: “Have you had a conversation or reached an agreement…about safeguards or procedures when it comes to the issue of presidential disability?”

It’s a question that looms ever larger in the middle of a deadly pandemic—and larger still after President Donald Trump was hospitalized last week for COVID-19. It matters more than it normally would because no matter wins this year’s presidential election, he will be the oldest man ever inaugurated into the office in January: Trump will be 74 years old, and Biden will be 78.

Both candidates completely ignored it.

Pence dodged by going back to a previous topic, scolding Harris for comments she’d made previously about a potential COVID-19 vaccine. He pivoted away to the Trump administration’s tired talking points about the swine flu that hit during President Barack Obama’s tenure.

Harris waved it away in an even less serious way, choosing to call up some random biographical details from her stump speech and vague nonsense about how she values hard work—which is great, but c’mon.

Unfortunately, Page moved along to a different question and didn’t press either candidate. That’s a shame because, again, this is almost literally the only thing that a vice president has to do. The other discussions about policy—and, yes, in a welcome change there was a good bit of actual discussion of policy on Wednesday night—are somewhat moot since a vice president’s formal responsibilities only kick in if the Senate is deadlocked or if the president can’t do his job anymore.

In fact, Page should have drilled down even further. Are there any circumstances under which Harris or Pence would ask the president’s cabinet to use their 25th Amendment powers to strip power from a president who was clearly unable to discharge his duties? The nation deserves to know.

It’s understandable that both Pence and Harris are unwilling to talk about the obvious health and age concerns surrounding their running mates, of course. And both did a satisfactory job of showing that they are competent adults if they have to take over as commander-in-chief.

Still, the specific question matters. The White House has been obfuscating and misleading the public regarding Trump’s recent bout with COVID-19, and this would have been an opportunity for Pence to reassure the public that there was a plan in place should the president’s health take a turn for the worse. Heck, a lot of Americans think Pence would be a better president anyway.

Harris missed an opportunity to draw a contrast with the current administration’s fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants strategy. Most Americans think Biden won’t finish even a single four-year term in the White House, so she could have reassured voters by demonstrating she was at least aware of that worry.

In a race between two very old men, one of whom is sick with a potentially deadly disease at this very minute, neither Harris nor Pence respected the voters enough to provide a little straight talk.

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Alexandria City Public Schools (ACPS) Superintendent Gregory Hutchings has always been proud to call himself a parent of two children who attend public school. Until recently, his website and Twitter biography both made reference to his children’s enrollment in ACPS.

But now, Hutchings has pulled one of his kids from ACPS—which remains all-virtual, to the frustration of many parents—and instead enrolled the child in a private Catholic high school currently following a hybrid model: some distance learning, and some in-person education.

“I can confirm that our family made a decision to change my daughter’s school this school year,” said Hutchings in a statement to Theogony, the student newspaper of ACPS’s T.C. Williams High School, which first broke the news. “Decisions like these are very personal family decisions and are not taken lightly. This in no way impacts my absolute lifelong, commitment to public education, to which I remain as personally dedicated as ever.”

The superintendent’s office confirmed the statement in an email to Reason.

It’s hard to blame Hutchings for trying to do right by his own child. But he is in a position to do right by thousands of other kids who don’t have the same opportunity to simply opt-out of a completely inadequate Zoom education: He could prioritize reopening APCS, which is slated to remain all-virtual for the entire fall semester. One wonders why some in-person learning has been deemed a necessity for some families, but not others.

Moreover, Hutchings previously expressed concerns about parents seeking alternative educational arrangements. In a July 23 virtual conversation with parents and teachers detailing the district’s fall plans, Hutchings fretted that in-person learning pods would cause some students to get ahead of their Zoom-based public school counterparts.

“The concern I have about that is, if this is something that’s occurring for people who have the means in regards to bring in dollars and hire somebody and get their kids together, we can cause inequities,” he said. “Even though we are intending to do the right thing, it can cause some inequities if some kids can do things and others can’t.”

Later during the conversation, Hutchings described pod-based learners as “privileged.”

“If you’re able to put your child in a learning pod, your kids are getting ahead,” he said. “The other students don’t get that same access.”

Students enrolled in pod-based learning, private tutoring, or private schooling that involves in-person instruction are indeed better off than those languishing in virtual education. But that’s a failure of public schools, which have largely chosen to privilege the demands of unions over the needs of children.

“Teachers unions have been an influential force against reopening schools even in cities and states where elected officials felt it could be done with reasonable safety,” notes New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait in a recent article. “The language and the logic of the pro-closing activism has treated the scientific case against in-person learning as a hardened fact.”

Contrary to the macabre insistence of union leadership that school reopenings would result in mass death, in-person learning is now taking place all over the country with minimal evidence of significant COVID-19 spread. Families of means are making arrangements for their children to learn alongside other children—in person, the way it should be. Alexandria’s school superintendent has made this choice for his own child. And yet the schools under his authority remain shuttered.

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