« Hey, Governor! |
Main
| Change More of the Same I Can Believe In »
November 19, 2008
Romney: I've Got An Idea...Let's Try Capitalism!
Mitt votes no on the auto industry bailout.
If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.As DrewM points out, letting them fail may be the only way to break the chokehold the UAW has on this industry. As a commenter on ace's site pointed out last week, GM has become a pension plan and healthcare insurance provider that partially subsidizes those services with the occasional automobile sale.Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.
A bailout would reward this sort of business practice. It would also reward unions for creating this income disparity between US auto manufacturers and Japanese automakers with plants in the US. My last two cars have been American, but I've had enough small problems with them (the first one didn't last as long as it should have and the second has been okay, but not great) to consider looking elsewhere for my next purchase. After all, the best car I've ever owned was foreign.
Man, I miss that car.
Anyway, I hate to nitpick, but to paraphrase one of Glenn Reynolds' favorite phrases, I'll believe the US auto industry is in crisis when its executives start acting like there's a crisis.
Posted by slublog at November 19, 2008 11:06 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.slublog.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/4007
Comments
For those GM employees concerned about their retirements don't fret the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) protects the retirement incomes of nearly 44 million American workers including those at GM.
The only problem is that the taxpayer is the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. Keep GM and its employees working or pay for their retirements.
http://nomedals.blogspot.com
Posted by: Jason at November 20, 2008 01:51 PM
Mitt's outreach on this issue is only the opening salvo in his surfacnig for a 2012 run. And since he's the only national figure who doesn't have his own talk show that is even mouthing a conservative point of view, let's give him the credit that's due. As I wrote the other day, fiscal conservatism is the blood of liberty. Without it, no other sort of conservative principle can prevail.
Read more
http://tinyurl.com/5hs6g3
Best Regards
Posted by: ATNorth at November 21, 2008 12:28 AM
If you give a mouse a cookie...
Posted by: Steve B at November 21, 2008 02:59 AM