Right now we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known.

I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening,

alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Walts,

Katanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Charlemagne the God, and so many more.

That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.

To bail out or not to bail out, that is the one of many questions.

From Marketplace, I'm Subrey Benishore in New York. First,

it was Spirit Airlines asking the government for help as it faces jet fuel prices that have doubled as a result of the war with Iran. The Trump administration's reportedly been in talks to offer

Spirit alone or even buy it. Then other low-cost airlines

followed suit asking for $2.5 billion in assistance. Marketplaces Carla Javier looks at the

precedent for using taxpayer money to help companies survive. By the time companies are discussing

bailouts, Deborah Lucas at MIT says.

They're already toast, and you're just trying to resurrect them from the dead, if you will.

She says that bailouts can have a bad reputation, but there are some cases where there is some justification. Where the whole economy is really disruptive, and there's this view that if you let a particular company fail,

that failure is going to lead to other firms to fail and it's just going to deepen either a

recession or a financial crisis. Lucas says that's why, in response to the 2008 financial crisis,

there was a lot of support for bailing out the banks. In the past,

bailouts were discussed with Congress, says Ted Dehaven at the Cato Institute.

But that's different with the Trump administration's second term, which signaled pretty much from

the outset that it had little regard, interest, and time for Congress's thoughts,

feelings, or anything else. De Haven says the challenge with any kind of bailout is the precedent

it sets. Eventually, it is likely that a future administration, a future Congress, will use those

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