Auto Execs Fly Corporate Jets to D.C., Tin Cups in Hand

[AGDee]

Originally Posted by KSig RC

What's "about to hit us" other than unemployment? We can deal with unemployment - turns out, the skills needed to run an assembly line are similar to the skills needed to repair bridges so people don't die during the morning commute, and that sort of investment from the majority at least shows tangible promise of return, including materials etc.

Let's not get overly dramatic here - this is an absolute tragedy for the city of Detroit. That's a fact. Extending anywhere past that is just hyperbole.

This post makes it sound like it will have no effect on anywhere but Detroit and that it is only affecting blue collar workers on the assembly line. I would think that the people who work in the 100,000 dealerships around the country feel differently.

Here is a list of all the auto plants by state:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/27808154
They are hardly limited to Michigan.

That doesn't include suppliers, many of whom are not in Michigan. I guess we'll see how bad it could get if Bush doesn't assist. If he does, some will never believe how bad it would have been.

[KSigkid]

Originally Posted by AGDee

This post makes it sound like it will have no effect on anywhere but Detroit and that it is only affecting blue collar workers on the assembly line. I would think that the people who work in the 100,000 dealerships around the country feel differently.

Here is a list of all the auto plants by state:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/27808154
They are hardly limited to Michigan.

That doesn't include suppliers, many of whom are not in Michigan. I guess we'll see how bad it could get if Bush doesn't assist. If he does, some will never believe how bad it would have been.

It seems more like he was responding to the concerns of how this was going to hit the blue collar workers, since that is where most of the concern has been directed in this thread. I may be wrong, but no one (or almost no one) in this thread has been questioning how upper level management (and even middle-level management) is going to recover from losing their jobs.

Again, I don't think anyone, even the people who are anti-bailout, are sitting around thinking that this is a good thing, or that it will have no (or minimal) effect. It seems like it's more of a balancing of the relative merits of the bailout versus the problems of it.

[KSig RC]

Originally Posted by AGDee

This post makes it sound like it will have no effect on anywhere but Detroit and that it is only affecting blue collar workers on the assembly line. I would think that the people who work in the 100,000 dealerships around the country feel differently.

Here is a list of all the auto plants by state:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/27808154
They are hardly limited to Michigan.

That doesn't include suppliers, many of whom are not in Michigan. I guess we'll see how bad it could get if Bush doesn't assist. If he does, some will never believe how bad it would have been.

I was using "Detroit" as representative of the auto industry as a whole - my apologies for being unclear.

Let me reiterate my point here:

If the three automakers fail and dissolve, millions of jobs will be lost. This is a big deal, this sucks for people in dozens of related fields, this is not something that will simply be "absorbed" by the rest of us.

The solution to that is NOT necessarily forcing every other person to subsidize the auto industry to protect those jobs. This MAY be a proper solution, but will it actually result in changes that protect those jobs over the long term? Would it be better to revamp the way America handles semi-skilled jobs, of which hundreds of thousands would spring up to fit the now-flooded (and wage-depressed, I'll admit) market?

Granted, we'll (at least partially) pay for this as a collective either way, through Welfare benefits, food stamps, even crime - what have you. However, and this is a hard pill for anyone close to the situation to swallow, I understand, but . . . it may be best to allow the companies to fail, rather than prop them up with little tangible evidence that there will be substantive changes to the way business is done.

We've propped up airlines in the past - guess what? The airlines are still, for the most part, poorly run.

Also, it is completely disingenuous to claim that millions of blue-collar workers are "suffering" due to the ineptitude of their CEOs. They may be suffering due to inept management in general, but even if each CEO had paid himself one billion dollars it wouldn't account for the losses of each. There was no contingency plan in place - or, rather, there was one, but it involved government bailouts instead of corporate strategy. They were caught with their pants down.

[Munchkin03]

Originally Posted by KSig RC

I was using "Detroit" as representative of the auto industry as a whole - my apologies for being unclear.

It was pretty clear to me. Isn't it synecdoche or metonymy or one of those crazy 8th grade grammar words that describes how Detroit=the auto industry, much like how Hollywood=the entertainment industry?