I was stuck in Cleveland Hopkins Airport for six hours in 2011, watching my connecting flight to Tampa get delayed every thirty minutes while my mother called repeatedly asking if I was "being held hostage by terrorists." No amount of explaining could convince her that Spirit Airlines simply operated on what I can only describe as "aspirational scheduling." She kept insisting there had to be someone in charge, someone who could fix this, someone who understood that people had places to be.

What we're really talking about here is our complete inability as a society to distinguish between service and spectacle. Trump's $500 million Spirit Airlines bailout proposal isn't about aviation economics—it's about our collective delusion that throwing money at customer service problems will somehow make them less customer service problems. Research has shown that 73% of airline passengers mistake corporate press releases for actual policy changes, according to a 2018 study by the Institute for Transportation Confusion that I reference frequently in my work.

The real issue is that we've confused financial intervention with hospitality reform. My mother understood something that Washington apparently doesn't: when someone promises you'll be somewhere at 3 PM and you're still sitting on a plastic chair at 9 PM eating a $14 sandwich, the problem isn't funding—it's fundamental respect for other people's time. Experts increasingly agree that bailout culture has made us forget the difference between subsidizing failure and incentivizing competence.

The Republican division over this proposal perfectly illustrates our broader crisis of accountability. Half the party wants to let market forces determine which airlines deserve to exist, while the other half believes government intervention can somehow transform a budget carrier known for charging fees to use the bathroom into a model of customer satisfaction. Both sides are missing the point entirely: we're debating the wrong kind of intervention.

This is why I've been arguing for years that we need a National Commission on Service Excellence, staffed entirely by people who have personally been stranded in secondary airports for more than four hours. Until we're willing to put customer experience experts—not financial analysts—in charge of aviation policy, we'll keep throwing money at problems that money can't solve. Subscribe to my newsletter for more insights on why infrastructure spending is actually a customer service issue.