Dare I say... with the exception of the corvette... who cares? I honestly think the government should tell the car companies to go screw. I know, I know people will loose their jobs blah blah blah.
I don't want a single dime of my tax money going to bail out any company or its employees. It goes against our free market/ capatilist system.
Ontop of that I think letthing them fail woul be a wake up call to the american auto industry and the autoworkers union, which is half the problem. Once upon a time unions serverd a purpose. Now they are just as bad as the companies they were made to fight against. Every year the union in our shop asks for more money, more benefits. Yet for the past several years their performance has been getting worse and worse. If I performed the way some people in our union do i would be tossed on the street, but good luck firing a union guy who slacks off all day.
We now have things like minimum wage, and labor laws to protect employees. I say let the companies fail, break up the unions. If the government wants to give out loans, let them be for new start up companies, who build better cars and have union free shops.!
Flame me all you want i don't care!
No offense but, uh... I think this is sort of crazy talk. As usual, there is a lot more grey and less black and white in this situation.
It's not just that people will lose their jobs, but that lots of people will lose their jobs, and one of the biggest parts of the American economy will be
dead and that's bad for many reasons. It's the only real manufacturing industry left in the US, and the support industries that exist for the automotive industry will tank as well. Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Subaru... no one wants this to happen, because when parts suppliers need to start closing factories, prices go up globally, and that means the automotive industry
as a whole will suffer. Millions (literally) of jobs loss does not do a single shred of good for your country, and "funding startups to make new cars!" is a borderline ridiculous suggestion given the enormity of the two markets. Something like 1 in 10 startups fail, and you want to: push unemployment over 10%, tank the largest and basically only well established manufacturing industry left in America, and invest billions of tax payers dollars into startups? Really? Think about that, man.
I don't really want to go into your issues with unions, but you are way (way) oversimplifying the role they play in labour markets and labour relations. Suffice it to say that your discussions about "minimum wage" and "labour laws" are... uh, how shall we say, quaint? Minimum wage in the US is barely above
poverty level income, your country has one of the largest wage gaps in the world, and the labour laws are generally ineffective and toothless in the way they are applied. It is gross naivety that leads anyone to suggest that they work as intended. They don't. Coupled with an absolutely crippled social safety net in the US and the last thing you want to do is start driving unemployment up higher. Investing in companies to keep them viable while they retool (notice Ford doesn't really need or want money, incidentally) to keep people working to keep them feeding their income back into the economy serves everyone, and its a social investment. This is actually a good thing. And it's not encouraging failure, it's giving a s*** about the millions of workers in auto factories, parts factories and their support industries.
All that said, I'm a little miffed that Chrysler wants money, and are getting it. I can't see them ever being financially viable again unless something major changes in the automarkets in the next 5 years in the same way that a huge spike in SUV sales or the minivan heyeday of the late 80's manages to revive them. That's just throwing good money after bad.
If you want to argue this more, PMs are probably preferable for everyone else...
