I think we need to look at the big picture here. I recently did a flight Houston to Las Vegas. Let's look at the numbers. I'm an 11 year captain and I make $165 an hour (way too low). It took three hours to do the flight. I made $495. Now divide that by 182 seats, and then divide that by 1272 miles. The answer you get is .00213 CASM for me. That's 2 thousandths of a penny per mile I'm costing the company. If I were to get a raise to $250 an hour, my portion of CASM would be .00312. The cost would only go up .0009 cents. Now, you also have to include the FO at roughly 2/3 of that. When the company says our CASM is around 5.5 and says it would go up by any appreciable amount they are lying. Even if we all got a raise to $500 an hour, our CASM would still be under six cents. Yes, this may be oversimplified and there are intangibles that I cannot quantify here. But to say a raise to industry-standard pay would cripple the company, is flat out wrong. We would still have one of the lowest CASMs in the industry, and one of the highest percent profit. And by the way my retro check is approaching $160,000 and climbing.

Not calling you out specifically, your post had CASM in it.