Deborah Lucas

Spirit Airlines doesn't have customer service.

You don't pay for customer service.

This is Basic Economy on Delta, American and United.

So know the downsides, which include no advanced seat assignment, last aboard the plane, only one carry-on bag, and you may not be allowed to use the overhead bin.

And no earning Delta SkyMiles, LayAdvantage, or United Mileage Plus points.

If not blocked, the merger of JetBlue and Spirit would result in higher fares and fewer choices for tens of millions of travelers across the country.

You had other people wanting this very much, as we all know, and it was just really a nice victory.

It was a very sweet victory.

Deborah Lucas teaches finance at MIT Sloan School.

I'd say an ideal government bailout is a bit of an oxymoron.

It's ideal if governments don't bail out companies.

You know, part of what makes a market economy productive is that unprofitable enterprises are allowed to fail.

That makes space for new or other existing ones to better deploy its labor and capital.

But of course, sometimes there is a situation where the government has no choice and

And then what's ideal is to intervene really as cheaply as you can, using a minimum amount of public resources, taxpayer dollars.

Do what you need to accomplish the goal of getting past the stress period.

And then after that, there needs to be an orderly and usually quick exit of the government.

Only do it if you really have to.

It will help you in the sense that the ability to get a car loan, the ability to get a mortgage will continue and not freeze up as it threatened to do a few days ago.

Yeah, so the logic behind the bailouts of the TARP period was that we were falling into a severe financial crisis, which ultimately led to the Great Recession.