Quote:
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.
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