This dude named Marx once said that Capitalism will be its own demise and that it will eventually replaced with communism.

If you actually believe it’s a worthwhile use of American taxpayer money to keep afloat a trio of companies that, by your own admission, no one is going to buy from (an attribute I listed but quickly dismissed as a meaningless option), I think we have what might be considered a fundamental conflict of underlying understandings. I tend to assume the point of a company is to make products or provide services, as would be the point of having employees.

Cite, please, and show your work: how is the UAW the problem here? Show that the UAW contracts are the cause and not, say the fact that the government pays for the health care of Toyota workers or Toyota execs are paid at a much lower rate or pretty much anything else that could be the cause of the alleged problem.

That has to be the most uninformed thing I have read about the current mess. GM and the like are currently in trouble not because no one is buying GM cars but becasue the credit crisis and econoic donwturn has created a sitution where no one is buying any cars. Toyotay, Honda, etc are all getting creamed. So once the Big Three close, those jobs are not coming back for ytears, if at all.

Because of past mistakes and the steps taken to correct past mistakes, the Big Three do not have the same cash on hand situation that Toyota et. al. do. Normally, this could be finessed by borrowing money, but, again, the credit crisis has made that very difficult for the auto makers to do at a rate they can reasonably afford. hence the bailout is reasonable to undertake, if you believe, as I do, that the big three can survive medium term and that the loss of jobs would be a crushing blow to the economy at this time. But those jobs will go, because the bad economy and credit crisis have made the car business crap for everybody.

However, since the demand for cars will rebound once the credit crisis is passed and really rebound when the economy picks up, there is little sense in driving the country deeper into recession and gut our industrial base as a solution to what appears to be a temporary problem.

Your Econ 101 textbook, by the way, does not model the actual economy all that well.

No Bailout until the UAW sees the light.

http://nomedals.blogspot.com

The US auto industry has been selling the same old spin since the early 80s. They’re always “just around the corner” from “turning it all around” and being “#1 again”. They’ve been far more successful and profitable at selling bull over the last 30 years than they ever were at selling vehicles. It’s all garbage and if the Obama administration does a bailout, it’s a guarantee that the same cast of characters will chew away at any sort of reform from the start and we’ll be right back where we are within 10 years.

President Obama, this is your moment of truth. Let them go!

I thought about that, but they would still need the extra money, so we would either be buying at a huge premium, or we would spend more money on top of the bridge loans.