Tag Archives: bailout

Auto Non-Industry

Posted by on March 26, 2009 No comments

I just sent this to President Obama (or rather, of course, whichever staffer gets to read these things):

Regarding the auto-industry bail out.

As a long-time General Motors stockholder, I would like to say PLEASE STOP. General Motors are Chrysler are bankrupt. Chrysler will never be a viable business on its own. General Motors might be, but it will take years and hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer (MY) money to get them to that point…if it ever happens, which is improbable.

The arguments based on jobs don’t work. Workers will have to be laid off anyway as the companies scale back. The arguments based on patriotism don’t work. A Honda built in the US is a more significant part of the US auto industry than a Chevy built in Mexico.

Ford MAY be viable, if they can survive their huge debt load long enough to get the products in the pipeline into the hands of consumers. They’ve done many of the right things, and have good products. They just need some time.

It is time to perform triage. If there must be an auto industry bail out, the limited resources available should be put into a company that has at least a chance of surviving without infinite taxpayer support.

Abandon Chrysler. There is no hope there, and never will be.

If you MUST bail out GM, do so through a structured bankruptcy. Simply giving them a blank check without forcing any change will simply led to more blank checks to a non-viable company.

Put most of the resources behind Ford, if they need it. The money there might do some good.

The American taxpayer is tired of opening his wallet to bail out incompetent companies who just happen to be short on brains and long on lobbyists. Stop the madness.

Trickle Up

Posted by on September 4, 2012 No comments

Have We Bought Enough Yet?

“Obama could have, instead of giving money to these large mortgage holders, said ‘We will pay off all mortgages up to $300,000.’ It would have cost far, far less than what they gave the banks.”

This is an excellent idea. The only thing wrong with it is that in this country we consider it morally wrong to give money to people who aren’t already rich. Only the rich and corporations are morally worthy of government largesse.

As far as the government is concerned, us commoners can fuck off; they’ll bail out Wall Street, but we don’t give them enough campaign contributions to be worth the investment.

Also, it would go against the interests of the very rich to question the benefits (to the very rich) of ‘trickle down’ economics. (For those not familiar with the term, it is a Reagan-era idea that if we give all our money to rich people, they’ll give a little of it back to everyone else. It remains very popular, with rich people, despite the resounding proof over the decades that that whole ‘give a little of it back’ part never happens.)

The way out of an economic downturn is to put money in the hands of people who will actually spend it; the common folks. Trickle UP. We’ve known that for generations. (it’s how we got out of the Great Depression; Social Security money and wartime mobilization jobs.) But what we actually do is give money to rich people and corporations. The only people that benefits is the rich and their corporations. So why do we do it?

Why do our legislators only do things that benefit the people who give them massive amounts of cash every year? Hmm. I’m stumped.