Please, sir, may I have another?
Posted November 13th, 2008 under how are politicians like executives? money, I dont know anything about politics, Socialism scares the hell out of meNow, the worst Congress ever wants to bail out the auto industry. I don’t really blame the auto industry folks. For years, the government has been propping up major airlines, so why shouldn’t they get a piece of the pie. It’s perfect timing, too, since they just gave the most stable banks in the US blank checks with no real accountability on how it will be spent. Take a look at this from a CBS news article:
The Treasury Department agreed to post every transaction on the Internet, but all it shows is the list of banks and how many billions they got. The brand new Financial Stability Oversight Board has met four times already but they don’t know how the banks are using the money. There’s no hint in the first official Treasury report to submitted to Congress last week. And Congress promised to create its own special oversight board, but more than five weeks later not one person has been named to the panel.
They didn’t even give the money to the troubled banks, but to the stable ones who are using it to acquire smaller institutions. That’s an awesome deal. So why wouldn’t Detroit itself ask for $10billion from the federal government and the major auto manufacturers ask for billion$ out of the bailout? It’s free money that you don’t have to be accountable for. Seriously, they need it. They are hardly staying solvent due to a decline in sales and the United Auto Workers union. It was just over a year and a half ago, the United Auto Workers union were negotiating contracts with the big 3 and arguing they were no where near close to collapsing.
Now, Obama, as part of the transition, asked Bush to solve their problems. Bush and team have already granted some $25billion in low interest loans to help the auto industry retool and focus on energy efficient technology. They don’t want to do it.
I understand that the auto industry accounts for some 3 million jobs, but those have been decreasing year over year due to the high cost of union workers and high compensation packages of executives. I’m all for people trying to get paid what ever they can get, but if your company… your source of income is at serious risk of just going away… don’t you accept pay cuts? Don’t you accept cuts in benefits? What else is there? loss of your job? If you can’t get by on what you earn, get a different job. If you can’t get a different job where you live, move.
The government can not guarantee you a job. It just can’t. This is a free market capitalism moderately government regulated capitalism system. Companies and industry rise and fall based on market demand. If the automotive industry was proving products that Americans generally wanted, they would be thriving. If they could successfully manage their costs, they would be thriving. Neither is true so they should fall. They will not all fail. There will be collapse and combinations. They’ve happened in the past and they’ll occur again. it’s painful, but healthy.
