With all this war rhetoric thrown around, it seems a reasonable jump to declare essential workers troops on the frontline deserving of what we give other troops (free health care, pension, heavily subsidized secondary education)
I think around 3X current levels. USPS mail carriers and handlers are being given no guidance or support right now either.
I don't disagree that the support for, say, airlines, are bailouts, but the connotation that word has from 2008-2009 mischaracterizes what's going on right now. When this all blows over, you absolutely want airlines ready for business. Letting heavily impacted businesses fail is a recipe for a depression.
The same excuse was used for banks during the recession. We need banks when the economy recovers, and we need people who know the system to unwind the major screw ups they did. What happened is most of the people who were responsible for the recession remained in power making a lot of money. Lessons were not really learned, other than that being too big to fail is a good position to be in.
Did they? Airline stock prices have collapsed, so unless insiders sold everything in January, "enrich themselves" really means standard executive pay...which might be high, but that's another issue. Airlines, as businesses, didn't behave especially irresponsibly for the past decade. It's nothing like the banking excesses in 2007 that causes 2008.
Air travel in the US was significantly more expensive when it was heavily regulated. By your logic, you very quickly get to a Chinese level of state ownership of businesses. Practically every large cap company would be on that list.