Surplus fleets have existed before. During 49er Gold Rush days, flotillas of sailing ships crowded into Yerba Buena (San Francisco) and were abandoned near shore. Many empty hulls were converted into hotels. Take a hint there. As cruise lines go belly-up because they’re non-essential, anchor their excess ships at port cities to serve as ad-hoc homeless shelters. Disney’s fleet could house quite a few.
The verymost end. Goodby
Well, tax issues are not the only reason cruise lines base in certain countries. One issue is standards related to crewing the vessels (crew qualiifications, pay, etc.).
Having the ships acting as hospitals would not be bad provided the ships are outfitted as hospitals, to include isolation rooms for those who need it. A hospital ship should not be just a repeat of the Diamond Princess disaster.
There is an opinion piece on Slate about this. What it may boil down to is “So, if there are few good reasons to bail out the cruise business, and some very good reasons not to, why does Trump think they’re a “prime” candidate for help? Well, he happens to be friends with Micky Arison, chairman of Carnival, which also sponsored The Apprentice. And this president always puts his friends first.” He must be conflicted, however. The thought of using U.S. tax dollars to help out all those non-American employees! Nah, that’s just collateral damage.
My suggestions on corporate bailouts, including cruise lines.
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No bailouts of foreign flagged cruise ship companies. Let Panama, the Cayman Islands, etc., bail them out. These companies avoid US taxes and labor laws.
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No bail out of any public company that reported profits for the years 2017 - 2019 and paid no federal taxes. Any bail out limited to the amount of FIT paid in the same period.
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No bail out for any private company that paid no income taxes 2017 - 2019. Any bail out limited to the amount of FIT paid in the same period.
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No bail out of any company that bought significant amounts of its own stock since the 2017 tax law.
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No bail out of any Trump or Kushner property.
Not really true. Windstar is a ‘premium’ cruise company. Their ships have anywhere from 250 to 400 people on them, rather than the thousands on the large cruise ships. They even run two sailing cruise ships that use much less energy. We took a 7-day Caribbean cruise on the Windsurf, a 288-passenger sailing cruise ship, and we paid $1699 each for it, which included all meals and beer/wine. You don’t have to be a one-percenter to pay $3400 per couple for an all-inclusive cruise. The big cattle-car ships are around $1000/ea anyway for the same cruise, with much less included.
I expect the cruise industry to slowly move to smaller ships. If you had to evacuate a ship like the Windsurf, it would be manageable by any reasonable port. The problem with the huge ships is that if an outbreak occurs there are almost no facilities in cruise ship ports capable of handling that many sick or isolated people at once, so no one lets them disembark and the entire ship becomes a disaster zone.
I wouldn’t bail out the cruise lines either, but that does not come without cost. There are a lot of small tourist-driven countries that absolutely rely on cruise ships for their local economy. Kill the cruise ship industry, and you’ll impoverish a lot of people. Even large countries will be hurt - The cruise industry creates about 7,000 jobs in Canada. Port cities like Los Angeles, Seattle, Vancouver, New York and Miami would be severely impacted, as would the ship builders and support companies.
Still, no bailouts. Let them restructure in a way more compatible with the new reality. And also, I’m not sure bailouts would work. Anyone here hankering to go on a cruise again? I’m certainly not - at least not until Covid-19 is years in the rear-view mirror. I’ll bet a lot of people feel the same way.
The beauty of giving money to people, not corporations, if that they’ll direct the money to businesses that earn the business. If that’s not cruise ships, that sucks for people whose jobs depended on that, but it’ll be great for people in other industries. Maybe people will ski more, or go to movies, or see comedy shows, or take road trips in RVs or something. All those things create jobs.
While I sympathize, and mostly agree, many of the flagged countries would be utterly unable to bail out the cruise industry.
So let’s say a company falls on hard times and loses half of its value and has capital losses much greater than their taxes in a year, and so they carry forward their losses. They do all the right things - restructuring debt, selling assets, etc. They begin to turn it around and, have modest profits in 2017 and 2018. They use their previous losses to offset their taxable profit, so for a couple of years they pay no tax. Should that company not get a bailout?
So we give a taxable benefit to solar companies to encourage them to build solar panels. A company rakes the offer, and starts a solar factory. It takes a huge capital investment, so the first two years are big losses. Then the company starts making some profit, but after applying the tax benefit they were offered, their tax obligation is zero. Then Covid-19 hits, and the company has to shut down and goes bankrupt.
No bailout for them either? They just took the deal we wanted them to take. Why should they be punished for it?
Even companies that bought their own stock only to watch it drop in half due to Covid-19? And what exactly is wrong with stock buybacks?
I would certainly stop them from buying back stock from this point on, as it would be easy to buy a lot of stock at depressed prices if you know you are getting a bailout and the price is going to go up, But I see no reason to punish companies that bought back stock years ago. Why? What are you trying to avoid?
I would add no bailouts for any company in which a politician of either party who voted for bailouts has a large financial interest.
Absolutely agree. The amount of fossil fuels burned, as well.
Bloody good riddance, the sooner the better.