If you can't read the text, it's this:
You probably thought it was smart to buy a foreign import of superior quality, with better mileage and resale value. Maybe you even thought that years of market share loss might prod us into rethinking our process and redesigning our products with better quality in mind. But you forgot one thing: We spend a shitload of money on lobbyists. So now you're out $25 billion, plus the cost of your Subaru. Maybe next time you'll buy American like a real man. Either way, we're cool.Isn't that hilarious? BTW, the average cost of the bailout is $250 per household. Which is not the real cost, as 40% of the population do not pay federal income taxes. So if you're not part of that bottom bracket (lucky guy!) you're paying even more.
Of course, this pales in comparison to the $7000 per household that we're pushing to our good friends in the financial industry. If you really want someone to be pissed at, punch the next investment banker you see right in the face. He deserves it 28 times more than a car industry executive.
Special X-Mas thank you to Devin for the linkage.
6 comments:
I must have subconsciously stored your italicized 'hilarious' and used it for my own purposes. Is it less work to comment on it than change it? Probably not.
My favorite, by which I mean 'the most annoying', part of this is that much of the money will be coming from funds previously allocated to help make cars more fuel-efficient. Is there any minute detail of this 'bailout' that is not completely fucked up?
Even just calling it a "bailout" is a fucking joke, since everybody knows that these companies are STILL going to fail anyway. Maybe it'll just take a couple of extra months.
Only issue I have with this whole shit can is that I am not getting a gazillion emails in my inbox saying write your senator, etc. and demand they not support this bill, like we did with the bank bailout. Why not or is it proof that we are so fucked in our addiction to oil that we are willing to do this.
Oh and your welcome!
Hail Hallah :)
The reason you're not seeing a huge backlash from the left is because of how central the Big 3 are to our manufacturing base. We don't make much of anything here anymore, and if the auto makers go bankrupt they're going to eviscerate what's left of that base. We're going to see mass layoffs, lost pensions and reduced worker's rights when the inevitable happens. That breaks the weepy little hearts of liberals all over. I'm one of them, but what's good for the goose and all that. I don't think we should bail out the investment firms, and the logic is the same for the auto makers. Fuck 'em all. The economy is going to crash either way, but the way things are going we're going to find that we're saddled with the same crappy institutions on the other side of recovery.
Ending up with the same crappy institutions means there has been no recovery, in my view. Not to nitpick, because I think your assessment is correct.
This whole Wall St. vs. Detroit issue is really an excellent illustration of American classism, the primary cause of all our troubles and divisions. On the Detroit side, what we see is three big companies that are essentially guilty of stupidity and mismanagement. They have to beg and grovel for a few billion dollars to keep themselves going, while providing the framework for millions of blue-collar American jobs. On the Wall Street side, what we've seen is not so much stupidity but greed, corruption, and malevolence. Investment banks didn't go under because they were merely stupid. They went under because they aggressively pursued Enron-like accounting schemes to hide risk and debt. In the same way that we can't forever simply print more money to pay for these bailouts without deferred, disastrous consequences, the investment banks couldn't forever fabricate profits out of thin air without the consequences growing increasingly damaging.
Yet the Wall Street firms walk away with hundreds of billions of dollars, with virtually no strings attached. The US automakers must grovel for a fraction of that cash while (presumably) being forced to make concessions and agree to all kinds of terms.
The best guess I can make about why the two groups were treated so differently is this: rich people benefited greatly from Wall Street's corruption, and those rich people don't buy American cars.
And please don't infer from what I wrote above that I support an NSA bailout for the "big 3" like Wall Street got. I don't. I think public money should be invested, not thrown away, and cars made by those companies are not a prudent investment. It makes no sense at all to give $35 Billion to three companies that you could by for less than a third of that. I say buy all three of them and turn them into two companies: one would continue to make parts for all those Ford, GM and Chrysler cars so the ones on the road can continue to be serviced with a plan to phase out that business over X number of years, and the other company would be a government-run enterprise devoted to rebuilding our national infrastructure with all of that displaced labor redirected to a new grid, the development of wind, solar, and geothermal power, and so on.
With a sufficiently grand and radical plan to revitalize our national infrastructure, it seems to me that the 2.5 to 4 million people who are indirectly employed by the big 3 could be repurposed quite easily. It's a big country, and we've got some damned big jobs to do. Keeping the worst, most backwards companies in a dying industry afloat should not be one of them.
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