$75 BILLION IN BAND-AIDS WON'T CURE AILING AIRLINES.

• Author: Rugy, Veronique De
• Position: ECONOMICS

REGAL CINEMAS ANNOUNCED in early October that it will temporarily close all 536 of its U.S. locations as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to keep customers away. This move affects about 40,000 employees across the country. Yet nobody in Congress is talking about a bailout for theaters.

Now compare that with the airline industry.

In April, Congress passed a $50 billion bailout for the airlines, including $25 billion in subsidized loans and another $25 billion meant to keep most airline workers employed until the end of September. As predicted, since consumers were not yet ready to fly, this taxpayer-funded bandaid only postponed the inevitable.

American Airlines and United Airlines furloughed 32,000 employees in the fall, claiming they had no choice without another $25 billion. So House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D--Calif.), President Donald Trump, and many Senate Republicans drew the obvious conclusion: The bailout should be bigger.

Advocates of the additional $25 billion bailout say a new injection of funding will be used to restore 35,000 jobs. But as my colleague Gary Leff and I show in new research published by George Mason University's Mercatus Center, the math doesn't add up.

Assuming an average annual salary of $100,000, supporting 35,000 airline employees for six months--the time covered under the new proposed bailout--should cost a total of $1.7 billion. Yet airlines are asking for $25 billion, which works out to $715,000 per job temporarily saved. A more plausible explanation is that--as with the first bailout--airlines are planning on using taxpayers' money, rather than their own, to cover the salaries of those who are at risk of furlough and the salaries of employees they have no intention of furloughing.

Airline representatives have argued that another bailout would not only help them bring back furloughed workers but also protect workers who went on leave back in April to avoid termination. Don't buy it. First, there is no indication that airlines plan to furlough those people. If they did, they would have had to notify them 60 days in advance, which they have not done. Second, the concern that airlines will make additional, yet-to-be-announced furloughs...