(Editor's Note: The following opinion column does not constitute an endorsement of any political party or candidate on the part of Newsmax.)
The 30-year-old Tom Clancy movie Clear and Present Danger was about the political fallout from the war on drugs. There’s a memorable moment where one D.C. swamp creature asks if the administration really wants to get involved in it.
“They want what every first-term administration wants,” another one responds. “A second term.”
I often think about this line whenever some policy item comes out right before an election. Unless there is some pressing, unavoidable issue at the time — like the financial crisis in 2008 — the motivation for any 11th-hour policy announcement is political.
That is certainly the impression I got when I saw that the Biden-Harris Department of Transportation (DOT) was launching a “broad public inquiry on the state of competition in air travel.”
This is a weird thing for the federal government to stick its nose into, as the U.S. airline industry has relatively good competition among its four major carriers. According to one study, those carriers and their annual number of fliers are:
- United (210 million)
- Delta (190 million)
- Southwest (172 million)
- American (165 million)
That is a wonderful distribution from the standpoint of the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), the formula for measuring monopolistic outcomes of a specific industry.
We wish the government would instead look into the state of competition in online search, where Google has a clear monopoly with its 82% of global market share. Of course, Google’s clear manipulation of data to help Democrats has absolutely nothing to do with its monopoly going unchecked.
So then why pick on airlines? In the last four years, the Democrats have blocked three airline deals and railed on airlines for charging so-called “junk fees” … even though many extra fees we see in between the sweet advertised deal and the final, awful ticket price are taxes.
The reason, as stated above, is politics. DOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg is rattling his regulatory saber to shake a few more coins out people before a close, expensive election. According to a recent Politico playbook:
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is in contention for a foreign policy role in a Harris administration, has now raised more than $15.3 million for the Harris Victory Fund in his personal capacity, according to a person with knowledge of his efforts across some two dozen events. He’s expected to make a final swing with two events in the coming days.
Fork over the dough or we’ll harass you with regulation in our second term. When a politician does this, it’s called fundraising. If the mob did it, it would be called extortion.
If Politico is talking about it this openly, it shows that Buttigieg isn’t being careful enough to distance himself between his official activity and his effort to climb the ladder in a second term, where everyone gets a promotion once Biden is out of the way.
Despite Buttigieg’s high-profile disasters, he hasn’t seemed to do any damage to the country’s air travel.
Once a luxury exclusively for the rich, but long available to Americans of all income levels, air travel is at an all-time high.
Indeed, one study by the industry trade organization Airlines for America (A4A) found that almost 90% of Americans have flown commercially, including two-thirds of those with household incomes below $50,000. The same study found that 71% of those who fly are satisfied or very satisfied with the experience.
Airfares are at historic lows, according to the DOT — adjusted for the Biden-Harris’s record inflation, of course. If the Democrats’ Department of Energy weren’t hell-bent on sacrificing our domestic energy production on the altar of their climate god, imagine how much better it would be.
Concentration among these few competitors hasn’t had an impact on prices, service or satisfaction for fliers. This precedent has long been supported by the data, including a 1994 study by the International Journal of Transport Economics, released coincidentally the same summer as Clear and Present Danger.
Although she’s running like a challenger, Harris wants the same thing every first-term president wants: a second term. Despite his paper-thin resume, the photogenic Buttigieg knows that the sky’s the limit for him.
If not this year, then four years from now. Buttigieg got almost 1 million votes in the 2020 primary, while Harris dropped out before it even started. If he’s not careful, the politically inept Harris may think that he poses a clear and present danger to her.
Jared Whitley is a longtime politico who has worked in the U.S. Congress, White House and defense industry. He is an award-winning writer, having won best blogger in the state from the Utah Society of Professional Journalists (2018) and best columnist from Best of the West (2016). He earned his MBA from Hult International Business School in Dubai. Read Jared Whitley's reports — More Here.