Because its all a matter of degree. I realize some are grabbing their pitchforks and acting like every penny a company makes should be allocated to the workers or whatever. Obviously (or at least it should be) this doesn't work.

I'm not against a dividend or even some of the buybacks. But 14B is very hard to defend in this industry because these days will not last forever and when they end, and they will, we will desperatly wish we held back a small fraction of that as well as further invested another small fraction into the business.

SWA almost put 1-2 legacies under (really under, like Ch7 gone bye bye under) from a lucky hedge bet that netted them a what...1B/yr advantage during a tough time? They spammed key markets and almost put thousands of pilots and others out of work and it only barely didn't succeed. This will happen again and when it does we (and others) won't be prepared for it. The only option at that point will be shrinking to profitability while yielding marketshare (regardless of to whom) and probably trying to raise a tiny portion of the burnback billions by issuing more shares at firesale prices.

So you may have "bought out a partner" but if the inevitable is because of how much you paid to do so you will later have to sell to numerous other partners and for much cheaper, then what point is it other than bonus time today.

14B lit on fire is impossible to defend. Acting like these salad days are eternal and this level of largess is sustainable is is the corporate equivalent of climbing over the fences and past the warning signs to take a selfie on the edge of a cliff because it looks cool.

As for us, its contract time and its very reasonable we get significant gains in all areas and that can happen with far less than the burnback monies; I don't look at the 14B and counting as all ours.

We should at the very least peel some of that off to invest in still much needed infrastructure. Do we have multipile redundant failsafe I.T. systems to stop the next meltdown? Does every jetway have high volume cold air? Does every station have adequate tugs and towbars? Do we still have rusted jetways that act up? Do we have enough agents and ground crew to get ground air on and be there for flights promptly? Are the salaries paid in certain markets sufficiently competitive to motivate our mission critical personnel to show up during a record cold snap/etc?

We could fix all of those issues for a small fraction of the 14B and counting lit on fire mostly for the indirect compensation of those making the decision to do so.

We can have dividends, buybacks, infrastructure and employee investments. Its the out of scale emphasis on the burnbacks that many are concerned with and its driving outrage far outside our industry and giving fodder to literal socialists to sway moderates because of it. No one will win from this, other than the golden parachute private island money crowd in the short term. You're free to defend it to this scale, but its not going to work out very well for any of us in the long run.