 Well welcome everybody. Thanks for coming. I'm Paul Glastres, editor of the Washington Monthly magazine. We're here with our friends at New America for this event, and we are grateful for your attendance. We're here to talk about the airline industry and a provocative story written for the Washington Monthly by Philip Longman and Lena Kahn. Phil and Lena are part of the New America's Markets, Enterprise and Resilience initiative led by Barry Lin, a promote political, industrial, economic, and environmental resistance, and document and clarify the dangers of extreme consolidation on the American political and economics scene. Now, Phil and Barry brought me this story idea about the decline of the American airline industry, and if you'd asked me ten years ago, is airline deregulation a problem? I'd have thought, no, like most people, airline deregulation had served, it seemed to serve my own interests well. My hometown is St. Louis, and I fly there a couple three times a year, and ten years ago you could jump on Southwest, you know, a week out and get a hundred and twenty dollar round-trip ticket and bag of peanuts and a nice seat, and it was quite comfortable, and who was to argue with airline deregulation? I was out in St. Louis a couple of weeks ago visiting my mother, and boy, you couldn't touch a Southwest airline ticket for under 500 bucks. So I got a two weeks out, three weeks out, I got a 400 plus dollar U.S. Airways ticket, which really wasn't a U.S. Airways jet, it was something called Mesa Airways, and there was a one of these 50 seat jets where you can't put your roller bag in the overhead compartment because they're too small, so everybody had to leave them at the jetway, and then all the way out I had to change planes in Cincinnati, all the way out there was a big guy sitting next to me, not that, just a big guy, and he was ouching over into my seat with, you know, no ability to do otherwise because of the narrowness of the seat, so I spent two and a half hours cricked over into the aisle like this. It was, I mean, it was as bad a flight as I've had since the bad old days of Aeroflot, it was so we've all kind of seen this sort of degradation of the airline industry, and so Phil and Barry and Lena came to us with the idea of writing story, which we're going to talk about now about the role of airline deregulation and whether it served its purpose. Let me just introduce the panel here today. Phil Longman, co-author of the story is a senior fellow at the Washington Monthly and the New America Foundation. He's written extensively on transportation policy. He's also the author of, I think, five books, including Best Care Anywhere and The Empty Cradle, and has written for such publications the Atlantic Monthly, Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, New Republic, and The Washington Post. We're very pleased today to have former Congressman Jim Oberstar. Congressman Oberstar served, he's the longest serving member of Congress in Minnesota history, represented Northeast Minnesota's 8th Congressional District from 1975 to 2011. He was chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee from 2007 until 2011. He is a major voice on transportation policy in this country and a visiting scholar at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Also with us today is Tom Jones. Tom is a columnist for Memphis Magazine and co-founder and main writer for the Smart City Memphis blog and a principal at Smart City Consulting. And finally, we have Josh Marks. He's the executive director of the American Aviation Institute, which is a part of, works out of George Washington University. He was the senior director at Max Airways, a startup airline and has been an aviation consultant and is himself a private pilot. So we've got practitioners, policy makers and a couple of critics here. So I just want to start off by asking Phil to come up and or to begin discussion. We just, we want to do it here at the, yeah, so Phil I'd like you to, you all have the article, I hope you've picked up a copy, but I'd like Phil to do a little bit of a summation of the argument of the evidence and so forth and so that we have a base to start from. Phil? Thank you, Paul. We have an awful lot of expertise in this room, much of which goes way beyond mine. So I just want to say a very few words and I hope leave a lot of room for discussion, but the article for those of you who haven't seen it begins I guess with the premise that the American airline industry is failing from just about everybody's point of view. Certainly it's failing from the point of view of shareholders, of airlines. This is an industry that's lost 50 billion dollars collectively in the last 10 years, in times when energy was expensive and times when energy has been cheap. It doesn't matter this industry has not been able to earn its cost of capital over time. Obviously we've seen just tremendous hardship and tragedy for the employees of airlines over the years. And we all have stories like Paul shared, and I'm sure we're going to hear a lot more stories like that, of just the sheer indignity of travel, what it has become. And most recently we have this new trend that has really now assumed enough momentum that it's become very serious, which is that major cities, not just podunk cities, major places like Cincinnati and Memphis and St. Louis are now finding themselves cut off from the global economy due to various mergers and machinations of the airline industry. These cities now are seriously handicapped in their economic development because of their deteriorating air service. This despite cities like Cincinnati being headquarters of major corporations, fortune 500 corporations like Procter & Gamble or St. Louis with Anheuser-Busch-Inbev or Pittsburgh with all the green energy and renewal that's been going on there. So our airline policy, or lack thereof, has in effect become more and more a kind of de facto industrial policy, whereby the fate of cities and regions rises and falls according to how well or how poorly the airline industry and its financiers deem to give it service. So that's the basic predicate of the piece. We spend a lot of time looking for inspiration from the long history of the United States in regulating railroads. And one might remember that the first regulation of basically any industry in the United States came in 1887 when the Interstate Commerce Commission was formed to deal with problems that are extremely analogous to what we have today. We, I think, have been under the thrall of an idea that deregulation has been on net a positive in lowering fares. I think that premise in itself needs scrutiny because it appears that the actual rate at which fares have declined was lower after deregulation than it was declining before. And so I hope we'll have a very rich discussion about all this. Again, our premise is only that we have a problem here now that can't be ignored, that needs to be fixed, that has risen down to the level of affecting the entire course of economic development in the United States. And we just look forward to an earnest conversation. Phil, thank you and Lena for your excellent article which I downloaded. I'm very proud of myself. I'm able to use the iPhone, the iPad and the MacBook Pro and a printer with an ethernet cable. I didn't know any of those things existed until I left Congress and didn't have anyone do that for me. I used to tell my staff who pleaded with me to learn the computer. I said, look, if I learn that then who needs you? They said, okay, just don't worry about it. But this is really a splendid piece and well thought through, well researched. In 1986, eight years after deregulation, there was a conference of airport managers, the Association of Airport Executives and what's called today the Airports Council International ACI in Minneapolis. During the conference, one of the principal speakers said, the problem with the aviation business today is we've got too many airlines. What this industry and our airport's association need is a few bankruptcies. Well, they've had their few bankruptcies. In fact, a lot of them. In 1978, I sat on the NIAS committee markup, full committee markup for Aviation Deregulation Act. It really troubled me, bothered me a great deal. How are small towns going to be served in an era where we don't have anybody standing between the airline and the airline traveler? No one looking out for the interest of cities rather than the airlines looking out for their own interest. And I offered an amendment to hold in service where that existed at the time and to provide a mechanism for funding service to small communities known as essential air service. That was my language, I picked that out of the blue. And then wrapping up my statement, I said, Mr. Chairman, if this amendment isn't passed in the era of deregulation, there will be towns like some in my district that are so remote that without air service, the only way to get there is to be born there. And I don't know where that idea came from, but it just popped into my head and said it. The place erupted into laughter. The chair put the question and it passed. I'd have never voted for it if it hadn't. Even that is under attack today, essential air service, serving small communities. In the first five years after deregulation, there are 22 new entrants into airline competition. But eight years later, only five of those were left and by 1990, only one survived. And I used to put this question at audiences. This is too risky to do it because you know too much about the subject matter, but I'll give you a frequent flyer miles if you can tell me which was that surviving carrier. Everybody says Southwest, it was America West. And now they're gone. In those first 20 years after deregulation, air travelers were saving on average six and a half billion dollars a year in airfares compared to pre deregulation era. But I think as Phil just suggested, the savings are in question today and the subject needs to be revisted. What happened in aviation was unforeseen after deregulation. Nobody was talking about a hub and spoke aviation system and the sort of consolidation and the, there's a great French term, bouleversement. A real upheaval in the industry in which the policy had been to aggregate customers and channel them into the overseas carriers, TWA, Pan Am, Eastern, who had long haul service Northwest to the Pacific Rim. And after deregulation, nobody predicted that the domestic carriers with the strong feed would overtake the international carriers because they hadn't, those international carriers hadn't developed a domestic feed. And that became the driving force for United to eventually acquire Pan Am service from Seattle to Tokyo and others to acquire routes including well, the disaster that Phil, you mentioned your hometown of St. Louis when Carl Icahn bought TWA and sold off their computer reservation system, made $300 million overnight and sold off their nonstop route from St. Louis to Heathrow, London to American Airlines for a billion dollars, I'm sorry, $400 million and American made it back in one year over a billion dollars in revenue in one year off that flight which they transferred from St. Louis to O'Hare. So now here you have St. Louis which was a thriving island of aviation service and now becomes a parched desert and this consolidation has continued and it's very much like what happened with the postal service and the railroads in the 1960s. The railroads just hated having passenger service and more than that having the railway post office because it was the RPO that was providing a margin of profit that the railroads had to continue service because the ICC would not allow them to discontinue a profitable line. So the postal service got this great idea of taking mail that had gone from Chisholm to Bewell five miles, work the mail, drop it off, pick up the bag and then go all the way to Duluth, 90 miles to Duluth. No, no, we're going to take all the mail from Chisholm, Bewell, Everless, Virginia, Cotton, so on to Duluth, sort it and then drive it 90 miles back. So this letter is going to take 180 mile round trip and somehow that was going to make good economic sense. Well, the airlines did the same thing. But the railroads conspired with the post office to take the RPO off so they could apply for discontinuance and shut down less than carload service, LCL service, as well as passenger service and convert to all freight. Well, the airlines have been following that same model over all the intervening years and consolidating and coming together. With the result that I, when I chaired the Aviation Subcommittee and the Investigations Noversight and chaired the full committee, vigorously opposed these mergers. You know, the code sharing started as a benign proposition, we'll give you seamless service. And I was home cleaning out some drawers, found my father's log in 1966 or so. He traveled out to Washington to visit us and he traveled Chisholm to Minneapolis by bus. Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Washington by air. You don't have to do that anymore. You don't make all those intermediary stops. And that was a great benefit of deregulation and of code sharing where you board one carrier and they'll transfer you to another but your luggage goes seamlessly, you go seamlessly. Then they transferred that model to the international arena. And Northwest arranged a code share with Air France. First with KLM, then with Air France, then with Alitalia. And the next move was to get antitrust immunity to have their code sharing protected from the antitrust laws. And from the adverse results of that kind of collusion. With the result that Northwest and KLM for a time competed but once the antitrust immunity was in place, they don't compete on fare any longer. And you had then the acquisition of Northwest by Delta and an immunized alliance. And the next one that came along was United with Continental. And I thought we had a chance of stopping that before the end of 2008 but the Bush Justice Department moved ahead to approve it. They never met a merger they couldn't like. And I said now you're going to have three global carriers, you have two now. You'll have three. And they will rule the world. And with the moves by U.S. Airways and American Airlines, we're coming ever closer to that reality. The European Economic Community in January opened an inquiry into the antitrust immunity status of United, Continental, Delta, Northwest, KLM, Air France, Alitalia, Czech, China, Eastern. No, it's China. China, Southern Airlines. And now you have the third global mega carrier poised to control the world market. They will not compete on price. You will see price following. And in fact that's what we have observed. So the future of aviation is at a perilous time. I think this is the most perilous moment for aviation since 1958 when President Eisenhower supported the creation of the modern FAA from the old Civil Aeronautics Authority. And began the process of investing in the airport construction program and modernizing our air traffic control system. That all goes back to 1958, but we're now in a stall. And I think the future for air travel is extremely perilous. Pull this off because it's better than speaking directly into a mic. So I'm the executive director of the American Aviation Institute, AAI, and obvious disclaimers right out of the gate. We do tend to take market oriented stances when it comes to regulatory issues. I spend a fair amount of my time examining current policy issues with the team at AAI, looking at foreign ownership, looking at alliances. And other policy actions taken in the past 10 years that may or may not have accomplished the original consumer intent, but have obvious implications for airline profitability and route viability. So I come at this from a different angle from many people. And I do think that one thing we can all agree on is that as we head into a period of profound change in the industry, I don't think there's any question for reasons that we'll talk about that the next five years are going to be critical for the industry. It is absolutely imperative to have a national dialogue on these issues and to develop at least some level of consensus, if not an official aviation policy, that defines the perspective of both the American government and the consumer towards airline service, defining what we mean by accessibility of air service, affordability of air service, the degree of antitrust protection that should be awarded both in a global context and domestically in the United States. These are all important things to discuss, and while we may all have different perspectives on the issue, the only way to advance the conversation is to consider those independent perspectives. So taking a step back, my background as we touched on is as a practitioner in the airline business. I've started an airline. I've worked with major carriers on route planning, revenue decisions. I have spent many, many, many days, weeks, months working with carriers to identify the hidden gems of market opportunities that exist around the United States. And when we hear stories about airports like Cincinnati or Memphis, where a legacy carrier that has consolidated is hanging on by a thread for political reasons, the obvious question that we ask ourselves is, well, why on earth hasn't somebody else moved in? I don't think there's any question when you look at a market like Cincinnati or Memphis that there is high-yield business traffic in that market. Selecting carefully the routes that you fly should result in economic benefits for the airline serving it and for the community. But the question remains, well, why hasn't it happened yet? It's not like Delta is going to go to the mat in Cincinnati if a startup comes in and offers to take over the service. They're going to hand the keys over. Here you go. It's all yours. You wanted it. We're out of here. We're consolidating at our existing hubs. It hasn't happened. Why isn't Southwest in that market? And I think it's too simplistic to say, well, it's not a Southwest market or they have existing service to Columbus or other markets in the area. The fundamental realities are that we see a divergence in today's market between airlines that serve business traffic and airlines that serve leisure traffic. Now it used to be ten years ago, you can even see it in how JetBlue started, that the differences between business and leisure traffic were much narrower than they are today. And one of the things that we've seen with international consolidation through any trust immunity, through the development of broad networks that encompass multiple countries, the resulting focus on sales contracts with Fortune 500 companies is that airlines have reoriented themselves to try to be the most attractive entities possible for business travelers. Now what that's meant is that there's been an enormous reshuffling of the deck across the industry. To start with the anecdotal stories about Southwest Airlines and their pricing, even Southwest has moved towards more of a business-oriented model. With higher fare classes, preferred boarding and other amenities that they use to target higher-end travelers. Well, what's happened to the ordinary price-sensitive leisure traveler? How does that person afford or get access to the national air system? There are airlines out there that serve that market and do it quite successfully. You love to hate them because they're called spirit and allegiance and they will nickel and dime you to death after you buy a $9 fare. And for whatever you say about it, they have been very, very successful with that business model. Because even when you pay the additional $35 to carry your bag on the airplane and $10 to get a seat and $5 to go to the lavatory, you're still paying a third of what you would have paid on Delta or United. And so they've been able to carve out a market and those carriers are growing very, very quickly. Same thing you can see with Frontier which is reorienting itself in that direction. So I think over time what you will see is a filling in the gaps of route networks in the United States. I'm not convinced by any means that there needs to be government intervention in order to solve the problem of why Cincinnati quite obviously has a gap between service demand and service supply. The question really for us at AAI in thinking about national aviation policy is what should the government be doing? Should the government be trying to standardize their product? Should the government embrace the diversity of product that you see with airlines like Spirit who have found a way to target price sensitive customers and give accessible air service? Or should they do what they have been doing over the past two years which is directly attempting to intervene and to standardize their product and restrict the ability of airlines like Spirit to innovate with what we all would think are somewhat wacky pricing policies. There are some fundamental policy decisions that have to get made there that I think go hand in hand with the broader perspective issues of should we be giving antitrust immunity? Should we be pursuing open market strategies across the board? Should the government be getting involved in depth in slot allocation decisions and congested airports and favoring explicitly low fare carriers for entry into competitive hubs? I think all those questions go together. I think to finish off my comments, I started with the premise that the next five years are absolutely critical for the industry. The reasons that I think they're critical are the following. Number one, as we have talked about, the consolidation genie is out of the bottle at this point. It's going to be very, very difficult now that you have carriers like Delta and United that have demonstrated the pricing power that results from global networks and from concentration of routes to try to discourage additional mergers. We're seeing it today with American and US Airways. They will continue. I have no doubt that airlines like JetBlue, Alaska, Hawaiian are all going to be in play at some point soon simply because they do what they do very well, but they are still fundamentally regional airlines. And to compete, I think, for the business traffic that's so critical in an elevated fuel environment, you need a different business model. The second issue is small community air service, and I see this as a two-part problem. The first part is that the technology of how we serve small communities is changing. 50-seat regional jets are economically obsolete. They do not work in a high-fuel environment to move people at airfares that they can afford to pay. More fundamentally, we have significant changes legislated now that change the standards that are required for pilots and the duty hours that they can fly, which will result in significant changes in pilot supply over the next three years. So even if you had the airplanes that were economically efficient, I think there's still a big question as to whether they're going to be enough pilots to actually fly them into the small communities. The third piece of the puzzle, though, is intermodal options and alternatives. When you look at markets like Cincinnati, I'll give you an example. Traffic from Cincinnati to Chicago today is roughly half the level in terms of local traffic that it was eight years ago. Half the level. The half that remained are the higher-fair passengers, which the airlines can afford to fly. What happened to everybody else? Are they still going from Cincinnati to Chicago? Yes. How are they going? It's called megabus. It's called the other bus services that have stepped in as well and are offering one-stop or non-stop bus connections from point A to point B. Now, there are also connecting hub options and other ways to get there, but I think it's too simplistic to treat aviation policy in isolation. If you're going to think about national aviation policy, you have to also think about routes that the airlines may not be economically able to fly and what other options consumers may have in order to get from point A to point B. If you're dealing with essential air service markets where there may not be an alternative, that's a completely different picture in my mind from service from Washington to Boston, say, or Cincinnati to Chicago, where there's a thriving bus service and other alternatives that can exist. I think all those pieces have to go into the discussion as well. Thank you. First, I want to thank Phil and Lena and the Washington Monthly for giving voice to more than a million people in Memphis who are often told how lucky we are to be paying some of the highest fares for a hub in the United States. The thing is, I don't think our leaders in Memphis are unconcerned or unaware of the problem, but there's a tendency to justify the fares because they feel powerless when it comes to knowing what to do and often feel like if they identify the problem, they're then going to be held accountable for solving the problem. At the same time, economic development officials in Memphis seem scared to say anything that would make our primary carrier upset. The logic being that if the airline is cutting 25% of our flights after telling us that it loves us, what could it possibly do if it decided to reject us? Memphis and the other cities that are in the Washington Monthly article are like the frog sitting in a pot of water that gets hotter and hotter until the frog is boiled to death. The impact from the high fares comes slowly and as a result we accept a decrease in service and adapt. We come to grips with an increase in fares and we adjust. And in this way, the impacts are often defined more personal than economic, although every person in our region has a horror story about airfares. There are the stories about the thousands of us who have driven 120 miles to Little Rock or even 210 miles to Nashville to save several hundred dollars. And although even sometimes when we drive to Little Rock we board a Delta flight that takes us back to Memphis and then our final destination. There's the $750 ticket that I bought recently to go to Cincinnati with 10 days notice. There's my friend who takes the overnight discount megabus from Chicago to Memphis because it's too expensive to fly in. There's the $900 ticket to Austin for a Memphis law firm that regularly works there and it's finding itself hard to be able to make that sense of that. There's the small business that wanted to consolidate its operations to Memphis but decided against it because it couldn't make the airfare make sense budgetarily. There's the National Music Organization that relocated from Memphis because it was too expensive for its members to fly in for the annual conference. There's the consultant for local government that had to renegotiate his contract because he had no idea that the airfares flying out of Memphis were going to be twice what he expected. And then we even have our mayor who drove eight hour round trip to St. Louis for a 90 minute meeting rather than pay $976 for a 75 minute flight. These are the kind of stories that are rampant in Memphis and they create such a disconnect between people working on economic development and the people they're serving. At the time of the Northwest and Delta Airlines merger, the Tennessee Commissioner of Economic Community Development told us that the value of the merger would bring Memphis's economy into the 21st century and was well worth whatever price we had to pay for it. The headline that day was Northwest Delta merger, good for Tennessee. The next day on the front page of the same newspaper, the headline was airline merger may be trouble for pinnacle airlines. That's our regional jet. Then Delta's CEO reassured us at a special breakfast meeting that all would remain well in Memphis and we were vital to the strategy of Delta, unfortunately gave the exact same speech in Cincinnati. And so over and over we've been given a steady diet of spin when serious scenario thinking would have served us better. Delta's 25% cut in flights is discontinuing of a year round direct flight to Amsterdam took place while the federal government was building a $72 million air traffic tower. And while our airport authority was building a parking garage and passenger transfer facility that cost even more. Except for the few hours when Delta flights are landing and departing, the airport in Memphis is eerily quiet. Despite more than a decade of talks that Northwest was imminent to move into Memphis, the old axiom still remains true. If you die in Memphis and go to heaven, you have to go through Atlanta. Mayor Wharton, the mayor of Memphis has said the whole world is about competition and we've got to find a way to be more competitive. I can't relocate my headquarters, but the business community can as we are seeing. But to pay a high fare and have to go through Atlanta is is kicking a man when it's down. This even seems to violate the Eighth Amendment against cruel and unusual punishment. There's little optimism in Memphis that things are going to get better and it's worth remembering that some of the highest fares for a hub in the United States is taking place in a region with some of the lowest median household incomes in the country. In the first decade of this century it wasn't any surprise to any of us in Memphis that our economy was struggling. We lost 50,000 jobs. We've been beaten hard by the global recessions like some of the other cities mentioned in the article. And the mergers of companies are taking more and more decision making outside of our borders. Our economy still remains fragile in Memphis and a lot of things have to be done right for us to improve our trajectory. High airfares are ice on our wings at the exact time that we need our economy to take off. It unlevels the playing field at the exact time that we need all of our opportunities to align for new jobs and economic growth. The repercussions to our economy are pervasive. If I have employees in Memphis it's too expensive and now inconvenient to fly them anywhere. If I'm a supplier in Memphis it's too expensive to see my customers unless I can drive to them. If I'm a professional it's too expensive to connect with a peer group in other cities. If I'm a young entrepreneur or young professional it's an expensive place to consider living and working. In other words at the exact time that every city needs to connect easily and freely with the rest of the world we have a major obstacle. And the greatest irony of all is that in the city where FedEx invented modern global commerce our citizens are being priced out of participation in the global and even the national market because of airfares. I'll end with this email I got from a colleague of mine recently when our conversation turned to her working out of Memphis. She lives in Chicago and she said I can commute to New York from Chicago cheaper than I can fly out of Memphis. It's such a cheap and easy flight from Chicago to New York. Think how much bigger my potential pool of employees colleagues clients is than if I lived in Memphis or if I were confined to Chicago. Already I'm advantaged in being in Chicago the market is much larger than Memphis. There are more people to buy from sell from learn from collaborate with now add New York to my market then compare that to Memphis. It's terribly unfair and it's getting more unfair every day. Well thank you all some very very powerful stuff. I want to open up the discussion first among us and then and then with with those here we have a just looking at the guest list a lot of very smart and knowledgeable people about the industry. And so I want to bring you into the conversation. But let me begin by asking a question that I think was asked by one of the commenters on our website on the story the original story. And it's not a question that I necessarily agree with but it's an obvious one from a more libertarian or free market perspective and and it goes something like this. OK so cities like Memphis or St. Louis are taking it on the chin. And we want to assure that they have if if in fact you buy into the notion that there's a political and governmental imperative or mandate that we ought to make sure that cities like Memphis or St. Louis have reasonably priced and frequent and useful air service. Wouldn't it be better to just pay subsidies to airlines to run those routes rather than as is suggested in Phil and Lena's article. Re-regulate the whole of the airline industry in some way to make sure that there's some kind of cross subsidization such that those of us who fly from Washington to L.A. cheaper than can one can fly from Memphis to Chicago. Our fares go up a little bit under a regulated system. So that that Phil was was kind of implicit in your story. Why not just have the federal government pay to low have lower fares from Memphis to Chicago. Well I think there are instances as in the legislation that you passed where it makes sense to ask ourselves for some little town up in the Iron Range. So we have a subsidy or not make it explicit. We can all balance our budget and take that into account but subsidizing cities of the magnitude of Cincinnati or Pittsburgh I think is a completely different order. I would suggest just as a thought experiment you know to revisit where we've been here before right in the in the 19th century. Railroads emerged as the dominant transportation form in a completely unregulated way. It led to a explosion of of of new players and construction people pushing railroads to every corner corner of the continent to the point by 1870s a third of the rail industry was in bankruptcy. This is kind of analogous to what we saw in airlines in the 1980s. Lots of new players building parallel lines not enough to get too bad. So even but even as an airline or railroads in this case were not thriving they controlled local monopolies right and thoughtful people began to notice that whether Cincinnati grew or Memphis grew. Or Chicago grew or Pittsburgh grew had everything to do with what the freight rates and passenger rates were on the railroads. And those in turn were being determined by people like Jay Gould and other financiers who were watering railroad stock. And it we found ourselves in a world where a man's enterprise a city's comparative advantages weren't being taken into account. It was rather the machinations of Wall Street that were determining what railroads went where and what they charge. And so as early as 1887 right we came to the conclusion as a country that this shall not stand. And it wasn't that we would say oh we're going to get into the business of picking winners and losers in the economy. We said we're not going to let financiers in the machinations of Wall Street pick winners and losers. Now what that meant in effect was that we had a system that equalized the prices between short haul and long haul and between various different regions. Now there are some things just about the basic physics of both railroads and airlines that we're up against. In the case of airlines it takes a tremendous amount of energy just to get the plane in the air. So if it lands 45 minutes later it has consumed 90 percent as much fuel as if it lands three hours later or something like that. So short hauls are always going to be much more expensive than long hauls. Also there are tremendous economies of scale in the airline industry. So you know whether you have an airport that has one plane with five people coming every day or 500 planes with 200 people each on each. You still have to have a tower. You still have to have baggage facilities. You still have to all have all this right. So the market will always begin to favor the high density routes which is also what happened in railroads right. So that's why you can fly from here to San Francisco for a half what it costs to fly from here to Pittsburgh right. It's because the density the economies of scale and the fact that the short haul actually does physically create as much cost almost as much cost is. So now you're going to say well you're going to just let live in that world as we find it just go on like this. I think not. I mean it's certainly not the American tradition. Every another key point to remember about this is airlines are like railroads like telephones like the Internet networked entities. So the more places they go and the more people have access to them the greater their utility right. So that's why from the very beginning people understood when telegraphs and telephones came along that they would require some cross subsidy to the outer reaches in order to be economically viable. I think the larger picture what we're seeing here is the logic of the market now is is forcing the airlines to go after the business traveler to go after the trunk line long distance. Thing and as they do and and and the rest of the world gets cut off from this network the value of the network itself goes down just as if there were fewer and fewer places that you could call on the telephone. So it seems to me more than appropriate that we have a public policy that looks to equalize these prices. It doesn't mean we have to go back to some of the absurdities that exist in under the Civil Aeronautics Board of micromanaging every little detail. But time to have a discussion. I would I would love to hear the thoughts of the rest of the panel on Phil's point. Well Phil painted a very broad picture and a very good one and well well said about the economies of scale. You know a short haul service that is under under two hours generates on average seven thousand nine thousand dollars net profit. Whereas long haul service transcontinental transatlantic is in the range of two hundred fifty thousand dollars net profit. So it does make better sense of the but but there is another context in which we ought to be considering the whether it would be good to pay subsidies or better to pay subsidies to operate. With these short haul routes. If you come down on on the yes answer to that question then you're simply going back to the days of the Civil Aeronautics Board and then and a whole range of calculations that have to be made to determine how much for what service for what gauge of aircraft. What time of day and a whole range of issues that bring you right back into the regulated era. The only era the only sector of transportation that really did what deregulation intended was trucking. We had a million trucks at the outset of the interstate era. Nineteen fifty six on America's roads today we have seven million trucking deregulation in nineteen seventy nine or so really resulted in an explosion of competition. In railroads we had sixty class sixty railroads not all of them class ones but they're all competing in nineteen eighty. Deregulation is supposed to get the government out of determining market entry and pricing and and that the Justice Department would prevent collusion combination and consolidation of the industry. Today we have four we have two duopoly's four major class one railroads to east and to west of the Mississippi. That's not direct head to head competition and that's that's that is what is happening now in aviation. If the next step goes goes through with the U.S. and American. So the context should be what is the public interest. What is the public role in seventeen eighty seven the Congress passed the Continental Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance which in nineteen eighty in seventeen eighty nine was incorporated into law of the of the new United States. By the first Congress as the free waterways policy. That the waterways are the common heritage of all Americans the airways are the common heritage of all Americans no one owns that airspace you have a privilege to fly in it and to use it. And in that context then what is the public interest and the public interest in in aviation deregulation was that we'd have competition. That as Mr. Mark said a little while ago should should we should there be a government intervention in the marketplace to equalize competition. That should have happened at the outset not and not in the aftermath of the mergers the D.O.T. has has one part of that regulatory authority and justice has the other justice has anti trust which is a very blunt instrument very difficult to to implement. Whereas D.O.T. can consider a much wider range of factors determining whether a merger would or an acquisition would be in the best public interest. We still have the public interest in the air service and determining the answer to that question whether to pay subsidies is a valuable and useful debate that we ought to engage in this country. Well I think as you say there's a question about whether there should be intervention and and the first step in that process is to define the criteria on which the American consumers prioritize what's important to them. Part of our frustration at AI is that there hasn't been a a defined playbook or a set of criteria that have been uniformly applied by D.O.T. even under the current administration they flip flopped on a number of these issues. They simply can't decide whether they're free market or interventionist and that's what's paralyzing for the industry because you don't know what game you're playing. I think with respect to to the the needs of small hub airports small communities clearly we have a different set of issues at play. Large large metropolitan areas like Washington New York San Francisco Chicago will always have the economic strength to be a competitive environment. When it comes to small hubs I posit as follows. You can choose between diversity of service and diversity affairs but it's very very difficult to get both at the same time because you're dealing with very different economic models when you choose to have diversity of service and a lot of nonstop routes in a relatively small market. To accomplish that as we saw in Cincinnati we see in Memphis it involves a lot of regional jets smaller aircraft that are flying a smaller number of people to diverse destinations giving them the convenience of nonstop service but with higher airfares to pay for. In contrast with markets like Cincinnati and this has developed over time as Delta has scaled the hub down there are alternatives that are lower fare and the cost of a lower airfare is a connecting flight itinerary. You put up with a longer travel time to get from point A to point B because you value money more than you value time. And so I think this is the fundamental decision point that we all have to think about which is in these compromised markets where there is a base of business traffic, there is wealth to be served, there is a demand for air travel. The airlines today are not well equipped to play this middle ground of both diverse service and affordable fares. They will look at these markets as opportunities if they can tap that business traffic and charge an appropriate fare. But the moment that they see that they can't do that and that aircraft are better more profitably deployed from a shareholder perspective in major hub markets it's natural to expect that the airlines are going to move the service out. So I think that when you talk about cities like Memphis you can't complain at the same time about length of travel and airfares or the fact that nonstop routes that used to be available a couple of years ago aren't available today. When you look at Cincinnati, you know Cincinnati was never a low cost air environment. It was always one of the prime places where Delta screwed people in terms of airfares because they could, because they could, right? It was a market with a very high willingness to pay and Delta was able to then base a hub there. They made up for the traffic gap, the fact there weren't a lot of leisure pastors in that market by connecting people from New York to LA and filling airplanes from Minneapolis to Atlanta and that's how they made that hub work. The difference now is that markets like Detroit have better business basis to work from. So if you're going to connect traffic it's more profitable for the airlines to do it in a market like Detroit than it is to do it in a market like Cincinnati. Those are the fundamental questions that need to be debated. Is there a need for policy intervention when airlines make those kinds of profit driven moves or is this simply a fact of life for these small hub communities? Can I just quickly say, it seems to me, sorry to interject here, but we talk about the airline market. But this is an airline market and Phil's piece makes a dozen accounting here in which we as taxpayers are paying an enormous amount of money to allow the market to function. Give me an example, Matt. Airports. You pay a PFC, which goes to the airport under a friendly minister program. Right. Okay. Okay. The bailout of pension funds as airlines go bankrupt, right? We're paying for that. For a certain number of airlines, correct? Yeah. So all of the R&D that went in originally to airline technology. The FAA. So it's not as if, the way you ask the question is that someone living in Cincinnati or Memphis ought to accept that because of their location in a major metropolitan area that happens not to be one of the top eight, that they have to choose between cost and frequency. I think was the distinction. Why? I guess is the answer, is the question, why should we ask them? We don't ask Americans who live in Memphis to choose between cell phones that can reach everyone in the United States or cell phones that cost three or four times as much as somebody's cell phone in San Francisco. So for the average person, I think they would wonder why they have to make that choice. Okay. Well, let's break those issues apart. I think, first of all, you can take issues like the roughly three billion dollars of cost that went into the 9-11 bailout and say this is a special situation. Probably all of us would have done that differently if we had tried to do something in more than a couple of days of deliberation. Right. That was a unique situation. When it comes to federal infrastructure funding for aviation, I agree with the point that the costs of the National Air Service System are borne by all travelers in all markets. Okay. The way that it works today in terms of ticket level taxes and segment taxes does roughly allocate the cost of that infrastructure on the routes that people fly. So New York pastors are paying a disproportionate share relative to Cincinnati pastors. I don't think you can make the case that there's an inequity between what people in Cincinnati have paid in versus what people in New York have paid in. I don't think that works when you actually distill it down. And we put out a report last year that went into a very significant amount of depth on this. But I do think you can say, you know, from the perspective of somebody in Cincinnati, should they have to make a choice? Right. You know, I again default to the market position on this in that if in fact there were demand in Cincinnati for lower cost air travel at volumes that could fill a flight to Orlando or to Fort Lauderdale, Southwest would be in that market. That's what they do. Right. But the fact of the matter is Cincinnati, to some extent like Austin, is an odd duck because it is a business market without that corresponding leisure demand in quantities that an airline can make viable. And so, you know, for every Cincinnati where you have that divergence of traffic, I can also point to markets like Austin, for example, that have both business traffic and leisure traffic. There are non-hub markets that have seen a significant growth in air service, but not because of hub consolidation, because there was an opportunity to be served. I think, you know, if and, you know, I'm not an airport guy, but I do think that that some of the issues that we're seeing with markets like Cincinnati and Memphis do also come down to the local community in that they have not figured out how to articulate the demand that they have for lower cost air travel to low fare carriers that could come in and serve the void. Or they are so focused on the breadth of non-stop service in terms of air service development in those communities that they don't look at alternatives from carriers that might come in and wouldn't play to the frequent flyer base in the city, you know, wouldn't play to the corporate contracts that are already in place. The classic example I think of this in the past decade has been Skybus. You know, Skybus was an airline born out of a local community's need for lower cost air travel. Skybus spent tens of millions of dollars building infrastructure, buying airplanes to serve the Columbus market, and connect them to points around the United States. I think the airline lasted three months, because again, given, you know, when push came to shove with the local community, the narcotic of frequent flyer points, the ease of traveling over some of these other competitive hubs was irresistible, and they wouldn't look at alternatives. These are market forces at play, and I think that, you know, it's important to consider those perspectives and not just think about, well, we paid an X to the infrastructure so we should have a right to a corresponding X of service. But that thought process ignores the reality of the marketplace of the concentrated hubs, where the, just take the example of Minneapolis, St. Paul, before the Delta acquisition of Northwest. It was a concentrated hub, it was in terms of the industry, a fortress hub. Northwest fought tooth and nail to prevent United Airlines from getting one gate at MSP. One gate, gate 33 was the battle cry. Why? Because they didn't want United to have a foothold in Minneapolis, St. Paul. They didn't want the competition. You know, look, all these big airline guys, they just, they want competition themselves to be the competitor, and no one else. And it's the public interest to ensure that we don't have bigness, that there is action taken by the Department of Transportation, the Justice Department and those fortress hubs to prevent the squeezing out of competition. You had the case of Spirit Airlines in the late 1980s, 88, 89, which started service from Boston to Detroit, three flights a day at half the fares of Northwest. Northwest doubled its service from Detroit to Boston, dropped their fares and provided beyonds and additional frequent flyer miles. And with the power of their Detroit hub, they were able within six months to drive Spirit out of the marketplace. And then the fares went up, eight dollars higher than they were prior to the competition. You know, that's the power of the hub. And the role of government was to ensure that there was equity in the competition, and government failed. It did not do its job. And Frank Mulvey, who served in Inspector General's office at DOT, served in the General Accounting Office, Government Accountability, it's called these days. And a brilliant economist analyzed a lot of that data in those years and provided testimony to our committee before I engaged him to come on the committee. But Frank, you ought to comment on that. Hold on, we're going to bring a microphone to you, sir. We found that fares were always higher at hub airports. We looked at all the hub airports around the country, including Cincinnati. In fact, what triggered it to begin with was the increase in fares after the Ozark acquisition in St. Louis. And we found that fares were much higher in St. Louis following the acquisition of TWA by Ozark. And the same thing was happening around the country, and we found that fares were always higher at the concentrated hubs. The power that the airlines had, as Mr. Oberstarr said, allowed them to charge higher fares. And it also allowed them, along with other things, to construct barriers to entry. And at the GAO, we identified eight barriers to entry that the more powerful legacy airlines were able to erect. Many of those have now since gone by the wayside. The airlines control the CRSs, for example. People today can book their flights online no longer need to rely upon a travel agent. I had a question I was going to put to the group. Please, I think we're ready to move into that stage. So please, you'll be our first. One of the predicates of deregulation was the fact that the airlines industry was perfectly contestable, or at least largely contestable. Contestability simply means that there are very, very low barriers to entry. We found that there were, at the time, 10 years later, significant barriers to entry. But many of those have since gone by the wayside. If indeed the airline market is relatively contestable, if not perfectly so, why haven't we seen more startup airlines or more of the smaller airlines begin entering these markets where fares are high, where margins are high? Is it because the overall economy in the U.S. and globally is down, and now once the economies of the world and the United States improve, we will again see new entry? Is this a cyclical thing, or is there a permanent loss of service to these smaller communities? Phil, I think in some ways you dealt with that a little bit in your piece. Can you maybe bring a historic perspective to the gentleman's question? In other words, were there not start-up railroads that were allowed in, and what happened there? Well, yes. The first of our great bubbles, actually the second, first we had a canal bubble, then we had a railroad bubble, largely financed by naive Europeans. The market got very enthusiastic about railroads and built them everywhere, and so we had an industry that couldn't earn its cost of capital either, and ultimately required regulation to maintain its viability as a private enterprise. So, I don't know if that's speaking to your question per se. Well, yes, and I think in the example of railroads, what ultimately happened was the ICC itself got captured by shippers and by various politicians and members of the public who just wanted fast, frequent, cheap passenger rail service everywhere, so the industry and also suffered from micro-management. I think in trying to learn from the past, one of the things I want to avoid I think is this kind of judicial model that the ICC, it was like a court. The commissioners wore robes, and people like Louis Brandeis would get up and argue cases, and there came to be an ICC bar, and same thing happened with the Civil Aeronautics Board back in the day. It was this gigantic bar of people, and it was all public record, but it wasn't political enough. Decisions came down to deeply technical questions that just allowed the people who had the most money for legal counsel to carry the day, and so, yeah, I don't want to go back just to the old days, but I think bottom line is we created this ICC in 1887. It became the de facto industrial policy of the United States, and we had that our government had to decide questions like what should be the relative rates of shipping a hog versus a ham from Dubuque to Chicago, right? And as it turned out, they had bunches of lawyers trying to figure that out, but we did it, right? And that became the de facto industrial policy of the United States was quite micro, right? And that was the era in which the United States emerged as the great industrial power, right? So I don't think that ultimately this was some kind of prescription for failure. ICC got completely out of control in the 60s and 70s with the railroads, but like all human organizations, it was prone to corruption and decay. Can I ask Mr. Marks a question following on Phyllis? Soliloquy, which provoked a lot of thought. Do you, after what you have experienced in the airline industry and what you're now doing in a sort of a think tank context, do you think the future of aviation is one of a very small number? And if the American U.S. goes through, you have three mega global carriers worldwide and a handful of major hubs and regional services, as you called it, non-hub carriers that are servicing short-haul routes, those under two hours timeframe. Is that the future model? Do you see that happening? Internationally, yes. And the reason I see that happening is that with the scale of the consolidated carrier, the number of American citizens who were covered by what I would call one-stop itineraries, a single hub connection, has now exceeded, I mean, certainly if you look at United Continental as a combined entity, it's well over 95% of Americans in one form or another can get from point A to point B over the United Network in one stop. The other factor here, though, that plays into this is the viability of a start-up airline. Having gone through that process, in the aftermath of value jet, the process of certifying airlines fundamentally changed in the United States. We prioritized safety over economic viability at that point. So the price tag of starting a carrier and the time investment that was required basically weaned out anybody who wasn't serious about doing it. And by serious, I mean anybody who didn't have $100 million of more financing, a new aircraft order or similar, a management team who knew what they were doing, safety infrastructure to be safe coming out of the gate, et cetera, et cetera. Well, good news is that the carriers that are certified today are safe. They are efficient. They're professionally managed. There's none of the fly-by-night stuff that you used to see 20 years ago. And I would argue that's a good thing from the perspective of the American public. The bad news is that the prior models that we saw in the 1980s and early 90s of throwing something up against the wall and seeing if it sticks, doesn't happen anymore. And that's a policy choice that even free market people like us would say is a good thing in that there are certain safety and operational standards that the FAA does a very good job of holding people to. But it makes it incredibly difficult to start a new carrier. Of the set that have been certified since the process changed, JetBlue and Virgin America are the two that have made it. And both I would argue today are, JetBlue had a period of success, but they're now marginally better than marginal, but not exactly blowing the doors off. And Virgin America is still unproven in terms of whether they can survive over the long term. The amount of capital that's required to build an airline in the United States is certainly a nine-figure number now. It may be a ten-figure number to make it happen. And I just don't see anybody in the financing community, I think airline investors are very intelligent, they're cyclical investors. Contrary to some popular opinion, they actually know what they're doing, they're not going to take the bet on that. So I do think that you end up by default, therefore, in a world with a handful of aggressive low-cost carriers with a highly unbundled product, an absolute lower fare focus, an unvarying push towards innovation and point-to-point air service. You may not like it, but that's what the spirits and the allegiance and the frontiers are going to be a couple of years from now. And the rest of the market, including Southwest, as a consolidated low-fair entity, as well as the three major carriers that are likely to result out of this process, will offer the less price-sensitive consumer who cares about itinerary time the one-stop connections from wherever you are to wherever you want to go in the world. I see that as the inevitable outcome. And the model that once existed, the economic model, that 10% of the air travelers were business travelers, but they accounted for 50% of the revenues. Do you think that model is changing? I do think that's changing, but I do think that that's a technological issue in that the internet, obviously the internet fundamentally changed how airlines distribute to customers, because where before you might have been restricted through CRS channels to nine or 10 or 10, 10 more fare buckets with relatively strict pricing levels so that there was a very blunt pricing curve. Today, with the internet, you can literally push a single price point to a single person if you want to. And that allows you to tailor the demand curve a lot cleaner than you ever used to be able to. The internet is the reason why airlines run at much higher load factors today than they used to. It's because you can sell that last seat very efficiently. You don't have to work through an indirect channel where you're blind. And as a result of that, I think that the differentiation, as I said, between business and leisure pricing has deadened out a bit. The airlines have responded to that through unbundling in being able to drive lower price points to more price sensitive passengers. But I do think that what the airlines continue to seek, as they should as profit maximizing enterprises, are routes where they can dominate the traffic base, where they can dominate the schedule base, where they can dominate the corporate contracts that feed the business traffic on, and ultimately in the end, the markets where they can have disproportionate service are the markets where they'll generate allegiance to the frequent flyer programs, where they'll generate the corporate contracts who will pay whatever it takes in order to have the access to your transportation system, and that is how they're going to sustain themselves from a profit perspective going forward. Tom, I want to make sure you can weigh in on some of this if you're interested. They're at a much deeper level than I could get. The only thing that I would say is in a city like ours, the frustration isn't just about the airfares. That's why it's so encouraging that you printed the article. It's the frustration that nobody seems to care, and that we're just down there talking to ourselves. So this is very exciting. The other thing that I want to harken back to is that Midwestern cities, in many respects, we're not a Southern city, we're a Midwestern city, are struggling, and we're already pushing a boulder up a hill, and that hill just gets higher and higher when we have no connectivity in any reliable way to the global economy. Yeah, it just seems to me that we are on the very early stages of what is likely to be a pushback. I mean, Memphis may not have quite the population or the number of Fortune 500 companies, but with St. Louis and Pittsburgh and Minneapolis and some of the other cities, they do have votes, right? They do have representation in Congress, and some of them are swing states, and at some point the average person's voice is going to be put in here, and when you have inevitable concentration in an industry, what often follows is a whole heck of a lot of regulation of that consolidated industry, and it seems like you can have a yeasty competitive market of players and different, and no one can complain if there's a competitive market that there may be some trade-offs, but if there's not competition, I don't know that forever the American public is going to accept dominant corporate players making decisions for their cities. Exactly, and on that point, government failed the public. I'm sorry, I didn't want to override you, but government failed the public by not intervening to prevent the consolidation of economic power in the airline sector in the years after deregulation, after the explosion of competition, contraction, consolidation, and now global consolidation. Absent a government disentangling of industry that is undoing the mergers. Should there be some government intervention in the marketplace to assure that there will be a regional airline service? That's the question I'm asking. I want to try, we won't have a lot of time, I'm going to put three questions together. Lena, if you can just, folks keep your questions nice and short and we'll try to get some answers. Well, I'll make a, first I'll make a comment before my question about, there probably is a correlation between those who want the government out of their hair and the location near a suffering formerly hub airport. But anyhow, my question has to do more with what I find missing in this article is what kind of deregulation are we talking about? And the other questioner I think focused on one of them was barriers to entry. And also what's come up is the cell phone network. That doesn't have differentiation because you make a call from one place, you're bound to get to another place. Has anyone thought of that barrier of entry of going back to where tickets were interchangeable as a lowering a barrier of entry and therefore if you were going to be a regional carrier you could automatically generate a ticket that would get you the same preferential rate on the long haul segment that anybody else could get and therefore you could sell that ticket complete with frequent flyer points on that long haul section. I mean, that's the kind of deregulation that may get some attention as opposed to a massive judicial kind of regulation. Okay. You know, that's a good point. We're going to try to... It would require some government intervention to do that. Frank, what do you think? It would be interesting to see if the logic and legacy outline would be set. I think that's not saying that... They're not going to accept anything to work. Sir, go ahead please. What nobody seems to have mentioned here is that there's been no deregulation in the U.S. airline management. And what I wanted to adjust is the question of the 75% requirement of U.S. ownership. Maybe we could get some of those naive Europeans to come in and operate to Memphis and to operate to Cincinnati. When you see the number of American airlines that have gone bankrupt in the past 10, 20 years it is absolutely shocking and you cannot blame that on deregulation. You have to blame an awful lot of that on very poor management. There is absolutely no question of that and we ought to open it up and Mr. Chairman I don't mean to say that we ought to let Lufthansa come in and operate here. I mean to say that if Lufthansa wants to do what Branson did open up a U.S. corporation that is subject to U.S. law, labor law, tax law, everything else operating just like a U.S. airline let Lufthansa do that. Why should we protect management when we've protected no one else? Very good. Another question. This gentleman right here. The airlines that's really happening. The one group of people we haven't talked about yet is workers. I'd hate to see how many jobs got lost from Memphis when Northwest pulled out. I'd hate to see how many jobs got lost from Lufth when Northwest pulled out. U.S. air and Pittsburgh so on and so forth. Let's talk about the impact on the workers in the industry as well. Okay. Lightning round of answers here gentlemen. Who wants to start us off? Congressman, you were... Well, I would just comment on the management. With the global carriers, do you really think that Richard Anderson is making all those decisions in Atlanta for Delta, that Air France, that KLM are not pushing his elbow in making those choices? You know, naive to think that in the era of antitrust and limited airlines that all decisions are made in the U.S. The outright ownership of U.S. airlines for management purposes that you rightly cited, there are some questions that have to be resolved like civil reserve air fleet access and domestic I'm just saying those are issues that have to be considered and involved. And the job losses, well that was you know any one of the golden parachutes for the senior management in these mergers and acquisitions would have paid the cost of the layoffs of the workforce. There are huge amounts of money went to airline management for badly running an airline selling it off and getting out of the way for someone else to manage it. I'm not going to defend airline management here that's a losing cause but I will say that foreign ownership is up there in the most important issues the industry is facing and it's not an issue necessarily of control of allowing foreign carriers to control American carriers of foreign domicile is antiquated in respect to the global capital environment that we live in and if we want to see investment by U.S. carriers in new markets and new aircraft and new maintenance facilities in any number of projects that require capital we're going to have to recognize the fact that today's hedge funds are Cayman entities are Bermudan entities that foreign investors like Lufthansa may have strategic interests in investing in non-control positions inside the United States Maxjet did go public foreign listed airline this was groundbreaking for us and that we did a London Stock Exchange listing and we lived every day the pain and suffering of how to reconcile foreign investment in the airline versus control issues I do think it's a solvable problem but I think that it's critical to think about that in the context of how to protect American jobs how to protect viability of air service it's not an issue of foreign carriers taking over U.S. carriers it's a question of how to pool foreign investment and knowledge in order to make the system more efficient folks I want to thank you for coming today I feel like we we're talking about things that simply aren't being talked about today in the news you just won't find these issues being discussed yet I do think we just from what you heard today these are issues that two years from now and I think on the front pages of the news so congratulations for being discerning enough to get here early on what is going to be an emerging conversation I want to thank our panelists for thoughtful and penetrating and informed debate and thank Barry, Lynn for having the foresight to see this as an issue and putting this all together and also my team at Washington Monthly Daniel Lutzer and Ryan Cooper Dan Strauss-Tucker and Carl Isley, thank you New America, see you all soon