Spirit Airlines is shutting down after rescue talks with the Trump administration collapsed, which means we are now living in a timeline where the federal government seriously considered spending half a billion dollars to keep alive an airline that most people would pay extra money to avoid.
Let that sink in for a moment. The same government that cannot seem to find funding for infrastructure repair, student loan forgiveness programs, or literally any initiative that does not involve either tax cuts or military spending was prepared to write a check large enough to fund a small nation’s healthcare system — just to ensure that Spirit could continue its core mission of charging you $47 to use the bathroom and another $12 if you want that bathroom to be clean.
The airline had been in active bailout negotiations with the Trump administration. Yes, negotiations. As if Spirit Airlines — the airline where passengers have fought over overhead bin space with the intensity of a medieval siege, where the business model is essentially “we will get you there, but we will make you regret every second of the journey” — was somehow critical infrastructure that required government intervention to survive.
Here is what makes this genuinely surreal: Spirit did not fail because it was a victim of market forces. It failed because it was Spirit. The airline operated on a model so aggressively penny-pinching that it managed to make flying feel like a punishment. They charged for water. They charged for checked bags on flights under an hour. They charged for the privilege of boarding your flight. At some point, you stop asking why people stopped flying Spirit and start asking why anyone ever flew Spirit in the first place.
Yet somewhere in a government office, someone was making the case that this was worth saving. That the free market should be suspended so that Spirit could continue its relentless campaign to monetize every human need. The argument was probably something like: “We cannot let Spirit fail because of jobs” — a phrase that has been used to justify every economically indefensible decision made in the past thirty years.
Let us imagine, for a moment, what that $500 million could have bought instead. That is enough money to fully fund approximately 6,000 elementary school teachers for a year. It is enough to repair roughly 400 miles of highway. It is enough to fund cancer research, mental health services, or housing programs. But no — the administration was prepared to spend it so that people could continue paying Spirit Airlines to treat them like cargo that complains.
The beautiful irony is that Spirit’s collapse means the market actually worked. The airline was losing money because nobody wanted to fly it. Customers voted with their wallets, and Spirit lost. This is capitalism functioning exactly as intended — failure as a consequence of offering a product nobody wants at a price nobody wants to pay. And the government’s instinct was to suspend that mechanism because the failure was happening to a company in a politically important industry.
Spirit’s shutdown will probably result in some job losses, and those are real and worth taking seriously. But the solution to job losses is not to bail out companies that are failing because their business model is fundamentally broken. The solution is to have actual transition programs, worker retraining initiatives, and social safety nets robust enough that people are not terrified when a bad employer closes. Instead, we get half-billion-dollar bailouts for airlines that charge you to breathe the air.
The airline industry has spent decades extracting every possible dollar from passengers while simultaneously arguing that they cannot survive without government help. They have consolidated into a handful of massive carriers that control most routes, meaning there is no real competition to push them toward treating customers better. Spirit was the logical endpoint of that strategy — an airline so committed to extracting maximum revenue from minimum service that it became a punchline. And when the punchline finally stopped being profitable, the government considered making taxpayers the audience.
Spirit is gone now, which means you no longer have to make the specific choice to avoid Spirit Airlines — you simply will not have that option. For most people, this will be a net positive. For the company’s employees, it is a genuine problem that deserves real solutions. But for the rest of us, it is a reminder that sometimes the market does work. Sometimes a company so dedicated to extracting value rather than creating it will simply fail. And sometimes — just sometimes — the government will decide not to spend your money to prevent that from happening.
That is not a victory. It is just what should have happened all along.