5th
U.S. auto industry is a wreck
And we shouldn’t have to bail out the whole lot full of lemons.
It is painful to watch the backbone of the American auto industry get bent backwards to the point of snapping, all the while Japan and Europe continue to zip ahead with even fewer emissions in their wake, but the worst part of this whole mess is the necessary cleanup.
If a Chevy Silverado and a Ford F-150 are headed directly at each other at 90 mph, and they’re less than a mile away, what will the force of impact be?
Waiting for an answer to that question is a lot like waiting for the self-destructive “Big Three” of Ford, GM and Chrysler to fight each other to the death over the shrinking domestic auto buyer’s market without throwing these drowning bastards a life preserver.
I hate to admit this—as I’ve been repeating that the auto industry deserves nothing for its stubborn adherence to old business practices that went boom in the ’70s and bust in this decade—but the federal government must continue its flirtation with socialism by giving out money to these beleaguered companies. If they do not give these greedy assholes the money they need to keep their companies afloat, then thousands more good people (AKA non-executives) will lose their jobs, unemployment will grow, inflation will rise and the hole will get deeper.
Rock and a hard place.
The money cannot be handed over to the jerks who had the nerve to fly to D.C. to demand that money be given to them to save their cars, they must be voted out by the shareholders, and outright fired. And additionally, their dimwitted helpers should also have to hit the job trail with them, because accountability has to be the new order in the financial world now. For a change.
Finally, a strict and down-to-the-cent analysis of how the taxpayer billions is going to save the domestic auto industry must be followed. No slack, no ignorance, no “well, it’ll get better after a while” crap—that’s the complacency that got us in this financial standoff to begin with. This needs to be an investment, not a handout, so when Ford and GM and Chrysler pull their heads out of their asses and figure out where they screwed up, and how to fix it, we want to be paid back in full, with interest.
You know, kind of like when you want to buy a car, you get a loan, and you pay it back with interest.
Or you know, we could just throw billions of dollars at the problem, say “fix it” and not worry about what the hell they’re doing with our hard-earned tax dollars.
But hey, they’re not Wall Street, are they?
