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Posted by Telperion the Silver (Member # 6074) on :
 
I freaking hate Congress right now.
They'll run the Big Three through the ringer for a LOAN which they'll pay back in a year or two...but they'll give hundreds of millions/billions of free money to the NYC banks?? With no oversights??

Disgusting.
Hypocracy.

Oh, and all those Wall Street CEO's flew in on private jets too. F#*@ Congress and the mass media. The Big Three are a vital strategic asset of America. These industries actually make the wealth that the big banks play with. What makes money? Labor, farms, mines, factories, ect...

You would risk destroying the hub of American factories and industrial might? You would risk an industry that actually makes the wealth of America that the big banks play around with?

And all these Congressmen on TV acting like they have some sort of doctorate in economics. Disgusting.

Well, when Detroit and Michigan/Ohio are utterly destroyed and the USA is in a great depression with no factories...and when we want to go to war and, oh wait, we can't build the tanks or planes anymore!
 
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
 
quote:
Hypocracy.
I'm not defending them at all, but how do you think it's hypocritical? After all, inconsistency != hypocracy.
 
Posted by katharina (Member # 827) on :
 
I suspect that the long, slow failure of the Big Three is what is driving public opinion, and it is public opinion that is driving the response.

Wall Street's mess was forseeable and something should have been done in the last five years to prevent. The Big Three's mess was forseeable and something should have been done in the last THIRTY years to prevent it.

With Wall Street, there is less of a sense of throwing good money after bad.
 
Posted by Christine (Member # 8594) on :
 
I wouldn't mind seeing the big 3 go down. I know we'd have some problems in the short run, but long term with them out of the way some smaller manufacturers could step up and maybe do something right for a change. It's not like the big 3 have made a single correct decision in decades. And we should reward that?

I didn't want wall street bailed out either.
 
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
 
There is also the whole "two wrongs don't make a right" aspect. It took a lot of Senate pork and a second run through Congress to get that one though and it seems to be pretty badly run so far.

Since they wasn't exactly keen on the first bailout anyways, in some ways the stand-off on the auto industry is actually consistent with their earlier stance.
 
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
 
quote:
but they'll give hundreds of millions/billions of free money to the NYC banks?? With no oversights??
No. They won't. This is not an accurate summary of the financial recovery plan.
 
Posted by Destineer (Member # 821) on :
 
As a Michigan native who recently moved back, I have very mixed feelings about the Big Three loan plans. These are companies that have shat all over the environment long after other car companies wised up a bit, and generally resisted innovation to the bitter end (which seems to have finally come).
 
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
 
The optimistic take would rather be that Congress is learning from its mistake with Wall Street, and determined not to be so stupid again. Hope springs eternal. In any case, while agreeing that the Wall Street bailout was likely a bad idea and certainly badly implemented, I don't see where that makes a Detroit bailout a good one, or likely to be well implemented.

Totally random thought: In the old MB game 'Fortress America', one of the good random cards the Americans could get was 'Detroit retools for defense!', giving three free tank regiments if you held Detroit. (And if you didn't you'd pretty much lost anyway, you really needed to stop the European Socialist Alliance in the Appalachians.) They'll have to fix that card now if they ever reprint the game. "Decaying factories refurbished for defense", maybe?

I played that game way too much, I can never see the name 'Detroit' without mentally adding "retools for defense!"
 
Posted by The Pixiest (Member # 1863) on :
 
Let them all fail. Corporations shouldn't get welfare anymore than individuals should.

Then, in the future, don't create a market for bad loans by doing your social engineering with the banking regulations.
 
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
 
quote:
They'll run the Big Three through the ringer for a LOAN which they'll pay back in a year or two...but they'll give hundreds of millions/billions of free money to the NYC banks?? With no oversights??
Telpherion, even if the government had gone with the Paulson Plan, you wouldn't be able to say that they were getting 'free money' with 'no oversights.'

They're putting the big three through the ringer pretty much because they have the luxury of time and because they are not concerned nor convinced of the radical necessity of a bailout plan for detroit.

In the case of the wall street bailout, the country was facing a complete financial breakdown due to the loss of fluidity in the commercial paper market. By the time the wall street bailout came to the table we were within days of an avoidable market lockdown that would have been disastrous. They simply didn't have the luxury of time. Credit default swaps and MBS's chock-full of toxic assets had led to a situation that would have, in short order, caused the American financial system to grind to a halt in a vicious fashion.

The detroit bailout plan is different because there's none of the same urgency or sense of immediacy (we have weeks, at least), and more or less we do have an option we have to mull over. In the wall street bailout plan, we basically knew that if we did not pass a plan quickly to get the commercial paper flowing again, the losses would total well over 700 billion and the effects on the economy would be much more dramatic and immediate. Essentially, the bailout plan was the worst idea besides all the other ones.

In the Detroit plan, what the government is wondering is if it really matters if they fork over the cash. There may be no positive solution that is, in the end, less damaging and costly than if they just let the companies go into bankruptcy. It is also not looming with dire immediacy as much as the larger financial crisis was.

That's all there is to it.
 
Posted by scifibum (Member # 7625) on :
 
"In the case of the wall street bailout, the country was facing a complete financial breakdown due to the loss of fluidity in the commercial paper market. By the time the wall street bailout came to the table we were within days of an avoidable market lockdown that would have been disastrous. They simply didn't have the luxury of time."

Yeah, that's what they were saying all right.
 
Posted by Amanecer (Member # 4068) on :
 
I think a huge part of the Big Three's problem relates to their unbelievable union contracts. NPR was going through the benefits the other day and they are second to none. No employee contributions to the medical plan, no co-pays, generous pensions, etc. NPR said that American factory workers at Toyota and Honda plants make similar salaries, but the benefits aren't comparable. The employees of corporations that need government aid should not be getting premium benefits any more than CEOs of corporations that need aid should be getting ridiculous salaries.
 
Posted by Sterling (Member # 8096) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by scifibum:
Yeah, that's what they were saying all right.

Yeah... That's sadly kind of the impression I've gotten, too.

"The sky is falling! We need an influx of capital NOW, or the banking sector is going to flat-out collapse!"

"Okay, we'll provide capital to keep you afloat. What are you going to do with that capital now?"

"We're going to sit on it and mull for a while."

...

That said, I don't know that the bailout was a bad idea, in premise if not necessarily in practice. For the same reason some sort of deal with the Big Three might have its merits: employment. The economy is officially in recession, and neither dumping hundreds of thousands of workers on the job market nor eliminating the ability of businesses new and old to get loans seems like a particularly good idea.

I would definitely like to get some serious concessions from U.S. automakers as a condition of a loan package, though, not least among them an increase in MPG of their typical cars and a tightening of the rules that have allowed them to crank out SUVs as "light trucks" for all these years. And I don't want to see a cent of any money planned for their restructuring going to lobbyists to fight such efforts, either.
 
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by scifibum:
"In the case of the wall street bailout, the country was facing a complete financial breakdown due to the loss of fluidity in the commercial paper market. By the time the wall street bailout came to the table we were within days of an avoidable market lockdown that would have been disastrous. They simply didn't have the luxury of time."

Yeah, that's what they were saying all right.

We really didn't have the luxury of time.

I know maybe you didn't consider it credible at the time. This is perfectly understandable. The current Rulers That Be had squandered their credibility and had very little when they needed it most. Congress (national approval rate 36%) and Bush (national approval rate negative a billion%) suddenly were in a situation where they HAD to step up to the plate and act in the true functional role of representative elected officials and say 'we need to do this. it is essential.' but nobody believed them because we had a good run between 2001-2006 where whenever they said that it was a peak-capacity load of crap.

The loan rates for Denver International Airport went from 2% to 12% overnight after the failure of the first bailout bill. DIA is the flight hub within the United States and it has been operating at a minor loss for this 2008 quarter. Normally this is not a problem at all (most airports fluctuate and have handled the post-9/11 airline crunch admirably) but suddenly it is in a situation where it risks being unable to acquire a typical operational costs loan and if it can get one it will end up having to take out that loan at a rate which will dangerously undercut its future operational costs recovery.

This is a single example — a microcosm — that I plucked out of a sea of stories about the bailout issue at the time. It is a single microscopic example of the risks of dropping the ball on our credit market. DIA can't get loans, DIA can't even do so much as maintain their yearly contract for snow removal. It is the hub of US air traffic. It's another 'too big to fail' operation. It would never be allowed to shut down. It would never be allowed to shut down. The government would certainly be forced to give it a 'handout.'

Now, study that microcosm. imagine all the other necessary 'handouts' that you could pluck from the rest of the U.S. economic infrastructure that would become depressingly inevitable if individuals and small operations and large operations are largely 1) unable to acquire loans, or 2) must acquire them at absurdly inflated rates. When we paid out the 700b, we gave ourselves at least a chance at keeping these future scenarios from playing out and throwing us into an infrastructure-shaking depression. It's why the bailout was inevitable. It gives us a chance, at least, to start making the reforms necessary to recover from our borkum MBS practices.

On the surface, to people who do not understand the crisis inherent to a credit-based market losing liquidity, you only have an interpretation in their heads of a bunch of rich jerks on Wall Street going "lol we spent all your money and lost it, plz give more!!" and they have no real incentive to support a bailout plan if they don't understand why the rich dips can't just be allowed to fall down and die on fire as a 'free-market' solution that doesn't 'cost' the common man anything. Except what it would have cost all of us would have been extraordinary. We would have given ourselves a pyrrhic victory against government handouts, and businesses would have started closing and liquidating at massive rates because they could not acquire standard operating cost loans.
 
Posted by AvidReader (Member # 6007) on :
 
quote:
Except what it would have cost all of us would have been extraordinary.
I think that's the problem right there. People in general have no clue how much money is involved in corporate lending. I've been in banking nearly 10 years now and I couldn't give you any hard numbers. But I know it must easily be in the billions of dollars a month. Every month.

I'm curious to know how many businesses are forced to take out loans to cover expenses. At the power plant, they're prohibited by law from raising money for maintenance or construction ahead of time. They must get a short term loan, have the work done, then charge their customers and pay back the bank. So if there's no loan, there's no outage. And if there's no outage, then there's no new fuel going into the reactor. Now what?

At least in that case, there's a pretty simple either/or. Either repeal the law and open consumers up to abuse by the company or make sure someone has fifty million to lend the power plant. It takes a certain volume of loans to have that kind of lending power. (6 million is 8 to 1, right?) You can't just let smaller banks take over. They would become large banks by definition.

So we can have people at the mercy of folks they don't trust raising capital they may not spend. We can let the smaller banks take over and become just as large as the failing banks with no guarantee that they'd be any different. Or we can salvage the larger banks we already have.

This is a problem largely created by regulation. Well-intentioned, of course, but unintended consequences and all that. We can only fix the problem with more regulation or none at all. And I don't trust the guy on the other end of my light switch with no regulation.

The worst part is that we have no guarantee that the bailout will be the catalyst we need to keep shady lending from happening again. You'd think after Enron et al that we'd hold Boards accountable for their CEOs' performance and compensation. But we didn't. Will we even do any better after this crisis is over?
 
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
 
quote:
But we didn't. Will we even do any better after this crisis is over?
I have no idea. I honestly hope our country (or rather, the world at this point) gets the picture and won't repeat the same dumb moves that put us in this situation in the first place.

quote:
This is a problem largely created by regulation.
Questionable. I do not think this statement is that true. A lot of the primary factors related to this crash have to do with nonregulation, such as was the case for credit default swaps.
 
Posted by AvidReader (Member # 6007) on :
 
quote:
A lot of the primary factors related to this crash have to do with nonregulation, such as was the case for credit default swaps.
If most of the things you want to do are heavily regulated and one path isn't, which one will you take when you want to get away with something?

To clarify, I think uneven levels of regulation were the problem.
 
Posted by katharina (Member # 827) on :
 
What the jobs bank is

quote:
Ken Pool is making good money. On weekdays, he shows up at 7 a.m. at Ford Motor Co.'s Michigan Truck Plant in Wayne, signs in, and then starts working -- on a crossword puzzle. Pool hates the monotony, but the pay is good: more than $31 an hour, plus benefits.
...

Pool is one of more than 12,000 American autoworkers who, instead of installing windshields or bending sheet metal, spend their days counting the hours in a jobs bank set up by Detroit automakers and Delphi Corp. as part of an extraordinary job security agreement with the United Auto Workers union.

Good grief. No wonder they are failing. That's a disastrous set up.

I hope they do get help, and that in order to get up, ridiculous stuff like that is cut. There's no way taxpayer money should go to things like that.

Look at the graphs at the side - unsurprisingly, GM, the company in the worst shape, had the largest group of people getting paid amazing wages for doing nothing. I'm all for unions, but the UAW killed their own industry.

That article is from 2005. Telp, the reason people are mad is because this very, very foreseeable. The auto industry has not been blindsided. They've been headed for a cliff for decades.
 
Posted by Tresopax (Member # 1063) on :
 
Bailing out banks but not car companies is neither hypocritical nor inconsistent. The difference is this:
The collapse of banking companies could cripple the entire economy, because money is the lifeblood of economic activity.
The collapse of auto companies would not cripple the entire economy.
In otherwords, if the above two assumptions are true, the government has a good reason to bail out banks but not auto companies.

Or, to put it another way, if your arm is hurting you go to see the doctor if the pain doesn't go away. But if your heart is hurting you go to the emergency room immediately. The reactions are different because the problems associated with your arm will mostly be related to the things your arm does, whereas the problems associated with your heart could kill your entire body.
 
Posted by cheiros do ender (Member # 8849) on :
 
I don't get why the US govt can't just let these institutions "fail". That doesn't mean all are made jobless.

Generally speaking, in any business, if an employee is unprofitable they get laid off. Makes sense, since a company won't last if it isn't profitable, right? Unfortunately though, with a lot of help from government, the relevant unions prevented this from happening.

The other side of the coin is capital. If an asset (for instance, a plant) isn't viable, it gets shut down. Again, the politics beat out commonsense and this was prevented from happening since it meant precious job cuts. Especially not in 'Big Three' American owned factories.

When a company does fail it will file for bankruptcy and go into receivership, wherein an appointed receiver is responsible for finally laying off ALL the employees and liquiding all assets, generally by selling them at bargain basement prices to competitors.

Just because a company isn't viable doesn't mean everything it does is unprofitable. In the case of a car manufacturer, many profitable plants can be sold to competitors and it's quite likely that the pre-bankruptcy employees will continue to have their jobs under a new name.

Neither of these bailouts has anything to do with financial stability. If anything, it destabilises stability. How are people supposed to feel confident about America's financial system when the big bank and big auto companies are being bailed out by an already hugely indebted federal government.

What this is about is an underlying nationalistic sentiments towards long standing American companies and against everyone else. In any case, no matter what the government does to try to fix this problem, the fact is they were largely responsible for it in the first place, and anything they do now to prop up the entirety of a failed business will just delay the inevitable collapse (the US can't just keep borrowing forever) that much worse for all involved.
 
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
 
Ah bailouts, I found this apropos:
quote:
My dear American neighbours,

I see the political crisis in Canada has finally made it into the Washington Post's Foreign Briefs column.

So, anticipating a flood of interest from all of you at the dog run in the morning, let me try to give you some idea of what's happening up there.

A few weeks ago, we had an election in Canada, a couple of weeks before yours, actually. A political party known as the Conservatives won.

Well, sort of. They didn't win in the sense that most of you understand winning. I'll get to that in a second.

They also aren't what most of you would consider conservative.

They support what you call socialized medicine, they believe in protecting a Canadian-controlled banking system, they believe in government as a vehicle for transferring wealth between regions, and they've actually muzzled party members who tried to make abortion a campaign issue.

In fact, instead of making his Sunday trip to church a photo opportunity, our Conservative leader refuses to discuss his faith in public. (Like many Americans, he's an evangelical Christian).
Different kettle of fish

So our Conservatives are a bit different from yours. Down here, you'd probably call them Democrats. And fairly liberal ones at that.

But, as I said, they won our last election, which is a pretty low-key affair compared to yours. The campaign lasted a few weeks instead of two years.

What's more, they won with only 37 per cent of the vote. Now, you can do that in Canada because our Parliament has three other political parties: The Liberals (again, pay no attention to the name, they tend to adapt their worldview as needed), the Bloc Québécois (a Quebec party that says it wants to break up the country, but hasn't actually done much about it for many years), and the NDP.

I'm not quite sure how to explain the NDP. The other parties like to call them socialists.

Some of their more doctrinaire members would like the government to nationalize or take a large financial stake in things like banks and manipulate the national economy by spending huge amounts of public money. You know, the sort of thing President George W. Bush has been doing this year.


I know, I know, it's confusing.

Funny old world, isn't it?

...

Wait a second. I forgot to explain why all this is happening. Bear with me.

You see, Canada's economy is in trouble. Just like everybody else's.

So when the Conservatives won, most people expected them to turn on the spending taps, the way every other country in the developed world is doing.

But Prime Minister Stephen Harper, for some reason, decided not to.

In fact, last week he had his finance minister announce that the government intends to run a surplus in its next budget. Meaning the government intends to take more in taxes from Canadians than it needs to run the country.

(I know President Bush has never run a surplus. But Canadian governments have, every year for more than a decade, even when the supposedly spendy Liberals were in charge.)

Anyway, in the middle of an economic crisis, Harper's plan didn't go over well with the three opposition parties and they saw their chance.

So that's what's happening.

Actually, if you think about it, our prime minister is doing exactly what President Bush keeps saying he'd like to be doing, instead of authorizing another trillion or so every week in new bailouts.

Maybe it's not such a funny old world after all.

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/12/03/f-rfa-macdonald.html

Ah, the irony.
 
Posted by Christine (Member # 8594) on :
 
Unfortunately, I fear that the lesson we are learning from all of this is: If you're big enough, the government will bail you out no matter what kind of foolish decisions you make.

I don't know if regulations or deregulation is the problem -- probably both and neither at the same time. I imagine that the problem is incorrect regulating. I have come to the conclusion that capitalism doesn't work without a little help, but that such help needs to be applied very carefully.
 
Posted by Ron Lambert (Member # 2872) on :
 
Christine, if the American auto industry goes down, then so also will the dealerships, parts suppliers, and all the other businesses that depend on the auto industry. Some people are saying that would cause the loss of 1 out of every 13 jobs in America. Talk about a real depression!

And who will we buy tanks and trucks from for our military--the Chinese?

The unions have made enormous sacrifices, in the past couple of days especially, to help the big three bring down the labor cost per vehicle to somewhere comparable to that of foreign companies. The subject of pensions and health care costs may still need to be addressed further.

I find it difficult to understand the hostility many people seem to have toward the American auto industry. Are we to give up all our manufacturing capability, and become a nation supported solely by a service industry? Can America continue to play its dominant role in the world if its main source of wealth is McDonalds, HVCR and plumbing contractors, and tax accountants?

Let me once again remind everyone of the key contribution the auto industry has made in our nation's history. When American first entered World War II, the Germans were not immediately concerned, because they thought it would take America at least 2-3 years to convert its manufacturing industry over to full-time war production. But the American auto industry astounded the world by switching over to full-time war production in only six months, producing tanks and trucks and jeeps instead of Buicks, Fords, Chevrolets, Chryslers, and Packards. This is what really won the war.

I think it is shameful the way Congress has imposed humiliation on the car company executives before they will even consider approving a bridge loan that will be paid back. The CEOs have pledged to be content with salaries of only $1 a year, and have to replace some of their most experienced managers with new people, "untainted" with the failures of the past. This time, the execs had to forego use of their corporate jets and travel to Washington in their most fuel-efficient cars. What next, do they have to climb the steps of the Capitol Building on their knees?

I ask again, why all this hatred? Does the auto industry really deserve this kind of treatment, when insurance and mortgage companies that are notorious for shafting people are given huge bailouts, no questions asked?
 
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
 
quote:
I find it difficult to understand the hostility many people seem to have toward the American auto industry. Are we to give up all our manufacturing capability, and become a nation supported solely by a service industry? Can America continue to play its dominant role in the world if its main source of wealth is McDonalds, HVCR and plumbing contractors, and tax accountants?
No wonder you have a hard time understanding others' positions on this, since you seem to have skipped over trying to understand those positions in favor of presenting your parade of horribles.

quote:
no questions asked?
Why do people keep saying this? There have been, and will continue to be, LOTS of questions asked of the banks and insurance companies. This characterization of the economic recovery plan as "free money" or "no questions asked" has gotten out of hand.
 
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Ron Lambert:
And who will we buy tanks and trucks from for our military--the Chinese?

The Japanese and Koreans actually. The number of cars produced in North America by foreign carmakers has increased to 8 million to 12 million by the domestics. I imagine this crisis has only accelerated this shift.

Also, don't kid yourself that the domestics are a particularly effective way of avoiding Chinese parts too. Consider developments such as these:
quote:
Ford to increase buying China-made auto parts

Ford Motor, reeling from its biggest loss in 14 years, will almost double purchases of parts made in China to cut production costs this year.

Ford will buy between $2.5 billion and $3 billion in auto parts in China, William Clay Ford Jr., the carmaker's chairman, said Thursday in Beijing. That compares with about $1.6 billion of purchases last year. The parts will be exported to assembly plants in Asia, the United States and Europe.

"We are only scratching the surface in China," Ford said. "China is key to our global sourcing strategy."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/26/business/ibrief.php

Globalization is a wonderful thing.
 
Posted by Ron Lambert (Member # 2872) on :
 
What "positions," Dagonee? That is what I am asking. WHY the hostility? Why the positions that it is OK to dump on the American auto industry?

Mucus, the American auto industry is criticized for not being competitive with foreign carmakers. And yet when they do make efforts to be competitive by outsourcing to foreign carmakers or parts makers, you criticize them for that too. What do you want? What course would you say the American car industry should follow? Or do you just want to kill off the American carmakers, no questions asked?
 
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
 
It wasn't a criticism. I said it was wonderful. I'm actually not being sarcastic.
 
Posted by Blayne Bradley (Member # 8565) on :
 
I would also point out Chinese tanks are currently suporior to American tanks, arguably the T-99 is better then the Abrams.
 
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Ron Lambert:
What course would you say the American car industry should follow? Or do you just want to kill off the American carmakers, no questions asked?

<insert pipe dream>

I want the American carmakers to do responsible research about the needs of their customers, and meet actual needs of their customers, rather than trying to create artificial hype and demand and *convince* us of what we "really need".

I want them to understand that the industry isn't sustainable when expecting people to buy new cars every other year. I want them to improve their quality, and efficiency not manufacture cars as a disposable commodity.

I want them to maintain quality without being so overwhelmingly bureaucratic that they drive their suppliers out of an already losing business. Even when times were reasonably good, my company sold off its automotive supply division because it hadn't made money in nearly a decade, and the demands and bureacracy were worse than those in government contracts. It was all about improving their image at our expense, and never dealing with the real issues.

And I want a pony for Christmas. It might be a better mode of transportation, even if a hayburner is horribly inefficent. It is biodegradable.
 
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
 
quote:
What "positions," Dagonee? That is what I am asking. WHY the hostility? Why the positions that it is OK to dump on the American auto industry?
I can't tell if the import of what you say here escapes you, or if you recognize the import and either tolerate or intend it. And I can't tell which prospect I find more frightening.

Look at the last question: "Why the positions that it is OK to dump on the American auto industry?"

Do you honestly think that those who hold the positions you disagree with see themselves as "dumping" on the auto industry? If you do, then it's no wonder you don't understand those positions. If you don't, then I see no willingness on your part to seek to understand.
 
Posted by Christine (Member # 8594) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by BannaOj:
quote:
Originally posted by Ron Lambert:
What course would you say the American car industry should follow? Or do you just want to kill off the American carmakers, no questions asked?

<insert pipe dream>

I want the American carmakers to do responsible research about the needs of their customers, and meet actual needs of their customers, rather than trying to create artificial hype and demand and *convince* us of what we "really need".

I want them to understand that the industry isn't sustainable when expecting people to buy new cars every other year. I want them to improve their quality, and efficiency not manufacture cars as a disposable commodity.

I want them to maintain quality without being so overwhelmingly bureaucratic that they drive their suppliers out of an already losing business. Even when times were reasonably good, my company sold off its automotive supply division because it hadn't made money in nearly a decade, and the demands and bureacracy were worse than those in government contracts. It was all about improving their image at our expense, and never dealing with the real issues.

And I want a pony for Christmas. It might be a better mode of transportation, even if a hayburner is horribly inefficent. It is biodegradable.

Ahhh, those were the days! When companies sought to earn our business through quality, innovation, and customer service...

I guess nowadays we're just supposed to pay them for the privilege of driving our economy, even if we'd rather not drive their cars.
 
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
 
quote:
And who will we buy tanks and trucks from for our military--the Chinese?
You'll buy them from the factories that are making them right now. "GM goes bankrupt" is not the same thing as "Every factory GM runs closes down and never makes another car/truck/tank". The profitable ones will continue, with different owners.
 
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
In GM's case, most likely they'll continue with the same owners. GM entering bankruptcy would be Chapter 11, which is for restructuring.

Chrysler is the only one I see much possibility of entering Chapter 7 (closing down), and they're more likely to go Chapter 11 as well.
 
Posted by AvidReader (Member # 6007) on :
 
quote:
Let me once again remind everyone of the key contribution the auto industry has made in our nation's history.
WWII was 60 years ago. How long are we supposed to prop up a failing mindset out of nostalgia and gratitude?

I don't want to see all manufacturing leave the US. I just don't think the Big 3 has a sustainable model. What do they even do with all the cars they make and don't sell every year? Even if Lyrhawn's right and Ford now makes quality cars that can compete with anyone, what are they going to do about the volume that they can't contractually cut back on?

I don't have the answer to how to reinvigorate manufacturing when it's so much cheaper and easier overseas. Maybe like the drug companies, companies should play up the American regs that ensure our safety. (Why Gerber hasn't been all over the tainted baby formula scandal I'll never know.) But apparently, making progress and hoping people notice the consumer reports isn't the answer. Bailout or no, if the Big 3 don't improve the people's perception of them, they're sunk no matter what.
 
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
Automobile manufacturing can be quite cost competitive in the US while providing good wages and benefits. Other manufacturers who have opened profitable US plants have shown that quite handily.

That the Big Three have not managed to is more a testament to their (and I don't mean just the management) inability to function when they actually have to compete with other people making good cars in a business-like fashion.
 
Posted by aspectre (Member # 2222) on :
 
"And I want a pony for Christmas. It might be a better mode of transportation, even if a hayburner is horribly inefficent. It is biodegradable."

Biodegradable ain't necessarily the same as good. Hayburners are notorious greenhouse gas producers, producing a bit over 1/3 of the anthropogenic methane (which causes 2/9 of all radiative forcing) and (along with chickens) 2/3 of the anthropogenic nitrous oxide (which causes 2/27 of all radiative forcing).
So domesticated ruminants (and chickens) are already responsible for 2/27 (methane) and 4/81 (nitrous oxide) for 10/81 or a bit over 12% of all GlobalWarming induced by human activity.

Considering additional pollution effects, I'd suspect that owning a pony would be as bad as running a car, or worse.

[ December 05, 2008, 06:34 AM: Message edited by: aspectre ]
 
Posted by Ron Lambert (Member # 2872) on :
 
Dagonee, I would tell you to stuff it, but it is apparent you are already full of yourself. In what way are your insulting comments a legitimate part of this discussion?

By the way, I did not ask why do so many people on this board manifest such hostility toward the American auto industry, I asked why do so many people manifest such hostility toward the American auto industry. Surely you will acknowledge that people exist outside of this message board.
 
Posted by The White Whale (Member # 6594) on :
 
quote:
I'd suspect that owning a pony would be as bad as running a car, or worse.
aspectre, but ponies are not made up of toxics and corrosives and don't require entire branches of industrial processes to produce and operate.

I'm assuming you used that pie chart that you linked to. The "12% of all Global Warming [from domesticated ruminants] induced by human activity" is dwarfed by the Industrial Processes, Transportation Fuels, and Fossil Fuel Retrieval, Processing, and Distribution (16.8% + 14.0% + 11.3% = 42.1%) that car production and operation require.

Unless you were being sarcastic...
 
Posted by Orincoro (Member # 8854) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Christine:
I wouldn't mind seeing the big 3 go down. I know we'd have some problems in the short run, but long term with them out of the way some smaller manufacturers could step up and maybe do something right for a change. It's not like the big 3 have made a single correct decision in decades. And we should reward that?

Moreover, the very notion is ultimately insulting to the American people. Here we have a failing industry that has dragged its heals for years on new technology and competition, with the promise of bailouts off in the distance just because they employ so many people. Meantime, their execs are reaping huge salaries as the companies lose money, and flying corporate jets to congressional hearings at around 100K a flight. There's not a lot of math to do in that situation. The leadership of these companies has been incompetent, lazy, buffoonish, and irresponsible.

I'm against a loan. I'm in favor of something like a forced buy-out, that would put a new set of people in charge with the motivation that's needed to make these companies profitable. There are people out there who can do it, so let's find a way to get them involved.
 
Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by aspectre:

Biodegradable ain't necessarily the same as good.

I know. [Wink] It was a wish list.

****

Although that 12.5% greenhouse emissions in the first pie chart is for all "agricultural byproducts", not just large animals.

Most livestock lives off of grain products. So while there are petrochemcicals used at every stage along the way, at least most of the carbon that gets released was already in the carbon-photo synthesis cycle, not locked in earth's crust, after being trapped there for millions of years by dead dinosaurs and prehistoric plants.

While I understand the detrimental effects that global warming will have on our general way of life, I've also wondered (and I know there is a growing body of scientific thought) that a "greenhouse" effect will indeed (and may already be) bringing on a huge surge in photosynthetic activity, because there is more carbon easily obtainable for plants to incorporate into their structures. Carbon dioxide still makes up 72% of "greenhouse" gases.

I'm not saying that we want to go back to prehistoric conditions but from your own article they know that CO2 concentrations have been 10 times higher than they were now, and life still managed to survive in one form or another.
 
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
 
I'm having a hard time deciding which is ultimately more corrosive to the potential profitability of american automakers: the leadership, or the UAW.
 
Posted by Lyrhawn (Member # 7039) on :
 
I'm curious.

I agree 100% with people who say that much of the Big Three's problem is their labor agreements with the UAW. They're ridiculously generous, and the UAW have dug their own grave in much of this. It looks like the specter of losing everything has finally spurred them to accept massive cuts, and it's about time.

So I'm with people on that one, even though I'd point out that recent contract negotiations have cut pay, introduced a two tiered system that pays new workers much, much less and has gotten rid of the more expensive workers through buyouts, and I'd point to the health care agreement that puts all the onus on the UAW to take care of the long term system after an initial endowment from the Big Three. That's going to take billions of dollars in costs off their balance sheets.

But even ignoring those recent agreements (as most people seem perfectly content to do), I'm still wondering about a lot of other things. I wonder why the Big Three are uniquely slammed for making SUVs. First off, the Asian companies make LOTS of SUVs, and advertise them like crazy as well. Toyota touts their big truck (the Tundra?), and Honda has the Odyssey, and Toyota has the Highlander, and they all have others as well. But the Big Three made massive sums of money off those things, while LOSING money on small cars. In other words, everyone is saying NOW, "why did you sell all those SUVs and not small cars?" which to me sounds like "why did you sell cars that made you tons of money instead of money losers that no one wants to buy in those numbers?" Ford and GM tried bringing their European models over here in the 90's but they didn't sell.

At the dawn of the 21st century things changed dramatically in several ways. The quality of American cars started to rise dramatically, after decades of criticism over its weakness. The price of oil skyrocketed, the economy tanked, and then a couple years later the credit crunch caused the number of cars nationally sold to plummet as well. It takes several years in the car industry to make fundamental changes in car lineups, in factory retooling, in R&D etc. Turnarounds take a few years. So they started in the early 2000's to cut down a bit on SUVs and to bring up small car models. Result? The Ford Focus constantly sells out, the Chevy Malibu wins top honors across the board in auto publications. Before the credit crunch, Ford had returned to profitability in the first quarter of this year, and it's not like the Big Three are alone in this, GM actually had their sales decline less than Honda and Toyota.

They also say "why don't the Big Three sell more hybrids?" Well, Ford has the best selling hybrid SUV in the world with the Ford Escape Hybrid, which they also can't seem to make enough of, and GM sells more hybrid models than Toyota does. Chevy has more high MPG models than Honda. And most of these cars are of the same quality that Honda and Toyota had a couple years ago, and I didn't hear anyone complaining about Asian car quality in 2005.

There seems to be some sort of myth that American car companies are living in the past selling only SUVs with bad gas mileage, with poor quality and no one wants them, when in reality they sell lots of high MPG cars, small cars, hybrids, and last year sold 8.5 million cars and trucks.

The stuff in the pipeline and what they are spending research dollars on is truly impressive as well. Ford is a pioneer in plant based chemicals and foam, while asian auto companies still use petroleum based foams, which are used in the manufacture of car seats. GM is putting tons of money into battery research in the hopes of making a real electric car that meets modern expectations while the asian automakers all say it's not feasible. But no one is railing against them.

I guess my point is, yes, there IS stuff to blame the Big Three for, and to expect them to change, but saying they haven't done a thing right in years, and heaping unfair criticism on them to me just means people would rather scapegoat than take the time to really understand the situation.

And Blayne, the T-99 is arguable at best. Better fuel consumption maybe since the M1A2 is a gas guzzler, though it can practically run on any kind of fuel, which is versatile, and it's faster over multiple terrains, to say nothing of the systems, which are of higher quality, and uses a still secret British armor technology that many aren't even sure how it works. They also have better integration technologies through a regiment and back to base command to coordinate attacks effectively. Combined with Apache Longbows and highly undetectable stealth UAVs with Hellfires, neither of which to my knowledge have real Chinese counterparts, I'd put my money on the US Army over the PLA. I'm impressed with some of the newer stuff that Russia is developing for export that I'm betting the Chinese will take and upgrade themselves since they can do the electronics better than the Russians can. The Chinese are catching up, but not quite there in a number of ways, though I think the biggest is training and live fire exercises.
 
Posted by Lyrhawn (Member # 7039) on :
 
quote:
The leadership of these companies has been incompetent, lazy, buffoonish, and irresponsible.
Well, in Nardelli and Mulally's case, they really haven't been there that long. I'm not sure how long Nardelli has been there, but Mulally was brought in from Boeing, after helping to bring them from near bankruptcy to having a best selling Dreamliner, and thanks to him, Ford is in the best shape out of all of the Big Three, and was actually proftable in the United States at the beginning of this year, and is extremely competitive in Europe. Wagoner is the only one who has really been there a long time, and has recently made a lot of good moves in trying to turn the company around, arguably one of the best of which was bringing in Bob Lutz to work on vehicle development, which brought about the fast tracking of a retooled Malibu, and the highly touted Chevy Volt and Cruze.

I think they make too much money too, but they aren't playing the fiddle while the industry burns. I think firing at least Mulally would be unnecessarily punitive and wouldn't accomplish anything positive.
 
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
 
quote:
I'd put my money on the US Army over the PLA.
I have no idea which tank is better, although usually I discount Blayne's ideas about Chinese stuff by about 90% or so. I do note, however, that your statement here is not the same as putting your money on the Abrams over the T99.
 
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
 
Samprimary : Perhaps they deserve each other.
 
Posted by Darth_Mauve (Member # 4709) on :
 
There is so much bad information, outdated accusations, and down right garbage on this debate, both pro and con, that I am tempted to give up on any attempt at clearing the air.

I'll try.

1) Military and the Auto Makers. During WWII, and to a lesser extent WWI, Korea and perhaps even Vietnam, the US turned to its massive Automotive Sector to build the weapons it needed for war. This was the most powerful tool the US brought into WWII. While many of the US weapons were inferior to Axis weapons (tanks and fighters for example) the Automotive industry made up for in quantity what we lacked in quality.
+1 for the bailout.

However, that type of war is not likely again. Our military has specialized. The big 3 are not producers of military hardware at the moment, and it would take a super-major effort to get them to be one again. The speed of modern warfare makes the time lag of production not viable.
-1 for bailout.

The argument has been made that even if we do need the plants for some military emergency, just because they are no longer in the hands of the big three doesn't mean that some other company won't be running the factories tomorrow.

I live in St. Louis. We have 1 empty Ford plant and one empty Chrysler plant. They broke the Ford plant down into a start-up lab for helping new businesses. It would be easier to build a new factory than retool the old one back into a single production facility. The Chrysler plant has had no other car company knocking on the door asking to build in its shell.

Further, if it is a foreign country that controls the plant then turning it to a defense plant becomes much more difficult.

Still, mostly a wash. Won't happen like that again.

What is of military value is the R&D of these companies. Hydrogen power, new long life batteries, and many other automotive innovations are being investigated by the big 3. Our military has uses for them in defending the country. If we surrender these major industries to the foreign competition then it will be Korea, Japan, China or Germany that will reap the military benefits of these discoveries.

+1 for bailout.

2) UAW Greed.
Over and over again from the wealthy I hear that the problem is the unfair and greed contracts that the UAW acquired.

Note that its not the automakers who are saying this. They are happy with the efforts the UAW has gone to help them cut costs.

The people who are saying this are, for the most part, the same people who defend overpaid CEO's of failing companies.

"Its not their fault they negotiated a good contract." they said. "They only get paid what the market bears" they said. "Its just a small expense in the overall balance sheet for the company" the say.

Are they talking about a $20,000,000/year executive or a $70,000/year line worker.

I've seen people shocked and amazed that these so-called workers have a good benefits package with no deductible and dental and etc etc etc.

Why, its almost as good as an executive at the big three. We can't have that. We'd hate to have the person working to make the care be as well taken care of as the person who sold too many dealerships, so brought around price-wars on their own products.

I have a full head on rant about the historic demand of owners and executives to have cheap labor and when forced to do so, take every opportunity to renege on that pay. From the first "Indentured Servants" in the US who were routinely deprived of the promised land and freedom when their 7 years of labor were finished, to the even early biblical example of Jacob-working 7 years than tricked out of his rightful wage--Rachel, and forced to accept what the owner considers good enough--Leah.

You can cry all you want about the evils of the UAW, Unions, or the contract, but note--it was a contract the big 3 agreed to, and it was a relationship with the UAW that the big three spent 50 years creating.

There are reason why we bailed out the banks but are not rushing to bail out the car companies, but for those who work there, and see there jobs and futures vanishing, it seems very class-oriented. White collar are too big to fail. Blue Collar need to have their greed beaten out of them.
 
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
... GM actually had their sales decline less than Honda and Toyota.

GM? That seems odd to me. Which particular numbers are you using. For example:
quote:

Consider the November sales data, showing GM ’s sales down 41% from a year earlier, Ford’s down 30%, and Chrysler’s down 47%. Foreign brands were hurt, too: Toyota down 34%, Honda 32%, Nissan 42%, Hyundai 40%.

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2008/12/04/how-far-should-taxpayers-go-to-rescue-automakers/

quote:
They also say "why don't the Big Three sell more hybrids?" Well, Ford has the best selling hybrid SUV in the world with the Ford Escape Hybrid, which they also can't seem to make enough of, and GM sells more hybrid models than Toyota does.
Forgetting the typical silliness that leads to things like hybrid SUVs in the first place, the more models thing is kind of misleading.
Consider:
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/12/02/business/02auto.graphic.jpg

Of course GM has more hybrid models, they have twice as many models in the first place.

Sales numbers of actual vehicles are more important than models.
 
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Darth_Mauve:
... While many of the US weapons were inferior to Axis weapons (tanks and fighters for example) the Automotive industry made up for in quantity what we lacked in quality.
+1 for the bailout.

I see old habits die hard [Wink]
 
Posted by Telperion the Silver (Member # 6074) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Ron Lambert:
Christine, if the American auto industry goes down, then so also will the dealerships, parts suppliers, and all the other businesses that depend on the auto industry. Some people are saying that would cause the loss of 1 out of every 13 jobs in America. Talk about a real depression!

And who will we buy tanks and trucks from for our military--the Chinese?

The unions have made enormous sacrifices, in the past couple of days especially, to help the big three bring down the labor cost per vehicle to somewhere comparable to that of foreign companies. The subject of pensions and health care costs may still need to be addressed further.

I find it difficult to understand the hostility many people seem to have toward the American auto industry. Are we to give up all our manufacturing capability, and become a nation supported solely by a service industry? Can America continue to play its dominant role in the world if its main source of wealth is McDonalds, HVCR and plumbing contractors, and tax accountants?

Let me once again remind everyone of the key contribution the auto industry has made in our nation's history. When American first entered World War II, the Germans were not immediately concerned, because they thought it would take America at least 2-3 years to convert its manufacturing industry over to full-time war production. But the American auto industry astounded the world by switching over to full-time war production in only six months, producing tanks and trucks and jeeps instead of Buicks, Fords, Chevrolets, Chryslers, and Packards. This is what really won the war.

I think it is shameful the way Congress has imposed humiliation on the car company executives before they will even consider approving a bridge loan that will be paid back. The CEOs have pledged to be content with salaries of only $1 a year, and have to replace some of their most experienced managers with new people, "untainted" with the failures of the past. This time, the execs had to forego use of their corporate jets and travel to Washington in their most fuel-efficient cars. What next, do they have to climb the steps of the Capitol Building on their knees?

I ask again, why all this hatred? Does the auto industry really deserve this kind of treatment, when insurance and mortgage companies that are notorious for shafting people are given huge bailouts, no questions asked?

HEAR HEAR!
 
Posted by Telperion the Silver (Member # 6074) on :
 
And, this is not just about employment.
These factories and industries are VITAL to the STRATEGIC future of the USA.

If these factories are allowed to disappear, we will never see them again in our lifetime. Mark my words.

Michigan, the surrounding States, and much of Canada will be decimated.

Do we really want to be a second rate power like the UK or Italy?

Most of the American public does not comprehend the importance of the auto industry.

No great power remains so when they allow their industries to die.
 
Posted by Blayne Bradley (Member # 8565) on :
 
It is also enevitable that no Great Power stays top dog forever.
 
Posted by Danlo the Wild (Member # 5378) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Telperion the Silver:
...and when we want to go to war and, oh wait, we can't build the tanks or planes anymore!

I think it is better to NEVER have to desire to go to war.
You only go to war when you have no other choice.

And now a few notes from Hatrack's Invalid but most Accurate Prophet!

______________________________________________________________

1. Modern America enjoys the comfort of stupidity.

It's the reason why most Americans do not THINK about God or the Universe. It hurts the brain, doesn't give answers, only more questions, and it isn't profitable. They want to be TOLD exactly what God is and what God wants. Most American's don't give more than 60 seconds a year of brain time to the magical marvels of the stars, galaxies and the diamond's in the center of White Dwarves.

So we've got a bunch of idiot politicians leading a bunch of idiots. The 'Banks' have failed and needed a 'Bailout' over 20 times since the 1980's. Read that sentence again please. So. When our politicians bailed out the 'banks' with a blank check book, no one said 'How do we stop this from happening again?' so we've given them the keys to our money, with out ANY oversight. The estimate of the bailout is now $5.5 Trillion to $7.7 Trillion dollars. But hey, America's got a gaywar to win and unborn babies to save. No time for thought!

2. The Car Companies are EVIL. - It is true. You see my friend, for a long, long, long time Politicians, Car companies, Insurance companies and Oil companies have been colluding to create a system that doesn't work and steals all your time and money. Look at how much of YOUR life, money and time you've spent on your car. Car costs $15,000, Insurance $1700 a year, Gas $2000 a year, Upkeep $1000 a year. It's all a scam. Why do you think that our Highways are SOOOOOO bad and our public transportation system is worse?
Highway I-35 extends from Mexico almost to Canada. The stretch from Austin through Ft. Worth to Oklahoma is 2 lanes 70% of the way. I commute to the University of North Texas from Ft. Worth M-F. The traffic is disgusting. This was the 'plan' all along. "We're only human, AND we're government. We can't even begin to imagine what 4 lanes would look like.' I live in Texas which probably has the LARGEST automobile size average, so it's clear that the Car companies didn't give two shizzez about 'human's or 'the future' only Money, money, money.

3. We're not a christian nation, we're a capitalist nation - The Banks are our gods. If they need $10 trillion of our time and money, we give it to them. No questions asked. Why do you think that American's took the anti-greed Jesus and spent trillions of dollars erecting thousands of million dollar churches in his name? The Banks asked them to. Why did we destroy all the Native Americans? They didn't need Banks.
 
Posted by Lyrhawn (Member # 7039) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by King of Men:
quote:
I'd put my money on the US Army over the PLA.
I have no idea which tank is better, although usually I discount Blayne's ideas about Chinese stuff by about 90% or so. I do note, however, that your statement here is not the same as putting your money on the Abrams over the T99.
True. I guess I should expand that then.

In a one on one fight, yes I'd take an upgraded M1A2 against the most current PLA tank, which I actually think is an upgraded T-98, but either way, it has a multitude of advantages, even for a tank that's been in service for almost 30 years. I'm somewhat curious actually to see what they're working on for the next generation, but I know the M1 was deveopled by Chrysler Defense.

The chances however of two tanks squaring off without support vehicles is extremely unlikely though, if we actually were to fight China. The only place I could imagine it happening was if China invaded Australia or Kuwait, where they have M1s but not the kind of integrated defense that we use. In other words, if the PLA ever fought the US Army, it would never just be with tanks, which makes the discussion of indivdual tanks and their attributes somewhat meaningless, depending of course entirely on the nation being discussed.
 
Posted by Lyrhawn (Member # 7039) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Telperion the Silver:
And, this is not just about employment.
These factories and industries are VITAL to the STRATEGIC future of the USA.

If these factories are allowed to disappear, we will never see them again in our lifetime. Mark my words.

Michigan, the surrounding States, and much of Canada will be decimated.

Do we really want to be a second rate power like the UK or Italy?

Most of the American public does not comprehend the importance of the auto industry.

No great power remains so when they allow their industries to die.

I mostly agree with your general sentiment of support, but I'm mixed on some of your specifics. First off, I'm not at all worried about our ability to build airplanes. Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grummuan and Boeing are still in the game (by that I mean, three of the largest defense contractors in the world), and several other companies made major bids during the last round of trials that produced the Raptor and the F-35 variants. Besides, as has been mentioned we've opted mostly for quality over quantity in the military lately. Our new planes are so sophisticated, and for that matter, superior to any other fighter in the world, that we don't need to blanket the sky with them.

And for ground systems, Chrysler and GM got out of the defense game decades ago. Both sold their defense arms to General Dynamics, who made the M1 as well as several other advanced systems.

In other words, keeping the Big Three around for defense purposes doesn't hold a lot of water in the production sense. Their R&D in many areas could prove extremely helpful for defense applications, but I suspect that nothing bad will happen to that research one way or the other.

I'm concerned about how the death of the auto industry would effect the midwest. It has a concentrated effect on Michigan's economy like I'm not sure any other single industry has on any other single state. But at the same time, I have to wonder why the state legislature is dragging its feet on measures proposed by Granholm to turn the state into a green power producer. The factories might not be able to be retooled to produce turbines easily, but certainly experienced line workers and a technological hub like southeast Michigan makes it a natural place to benefit from those millions of jobs that Obama is supposed to be creating in the next few years.

I do agree though that people are underestimating the direct and indirect ripple effects the downfall of the auto industry might have.
 
Posted by Lyrhawn (Member # 7039) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Mucus:
quote:
Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
... GM actually had their sales decline less than Honda and Toyota.

GM? That seems odd to me. Which particular numbers are you using. For example:
quote:

Consider the November sales data, showing GM ’s sales down 41% from a year earlier, Ford’s down 30%, and Chrysler’s down 47%. Foreign brands were hurt, too: Toyota down 34%, Honda 32%, Nissan 42%, Hyundai 40%.

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2008/12/04/how-far-should-taxpayers-go-to-rescue-automakers/

quote:
They also say "why don't the Big Three sell more hybrids?" Well, Ford has the best selling hybrid SUV in the world with the Ford Escape Hybrid, which they also can't seem to make enough of, and GM sells more hybrid models than Toyota does.
Forgetting the typical silliness that leads to things like hybrid SUVs in the first place, the more models thing is kind of misleading.
Consider:
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/12/02/business/02auto.graphic.jpg

Of course GM has more hybrid models, they have twice as many models in the first place.

Sales numbers of actual vehicles are more important than models.

My bad, I guess it was Ford, though I don't really think that detracts from my point. As far as the "silliness" of the hybrid escape goes, I wonder why you think it's silly? Two-mode Escalades, now that's silly. They're monumentally more expensive than an already regularly expensive Escalade, and get very small amounts of increased MPG. It wasn't worth the R&D or production dollars put into it. But the Escape is a pretty small SUV by SUV standards. It's only slightly bigger than most crossovers I see now (and smaller than some in fact). Regardless though, it gets better gas mileage than a lot of small cars do. If people are going to buy SUVs over small cars anyway, buying a small SUV that gets better gas mileage than some of those small cars is preferable to me.

I do agree however that GM should simplify their product line. From what I've read, they're going to dump Hummer one way or the other, and might get rid of Pontiac and Saturn as well. There's so much overlap from the different cars that it makes sense to get rid of some of them. But regardless, they offer large numbers of hybrids, with more coming and more impressive ones coming. It's a falsehood that keeps getting perpetuated that there are no American hybrids to be had. Part of that is also a patent issue. I know a lot of hybrid parts under patent in Japan are given first priority to Japanese automakers, and Ford at least only gets the leftovers.
 
Posted by Ron Lambert (Member # 2872) on :
 
Don't forget the GM Volt, which they have been planning to put into production in a year or two. While it will have a gasoline engine to help charge the battery, it will be propelled at all times by the electric motors, and will never run directly off the gasoline engine, like other current hybrids. This allows the gasoline engine to run at optimum speed for fuel efficiency when charging the battery. The battery also can be charged by plugging it in overnight. One of my younger brothers is an engineer for GM, and he claims the Volt will be superior to the Toyota Prius.
 
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
Telp: Bankruptcy wouldn't make the factories disappear in the slightest. Some would, sure, the ones producing more cars than people need. Just like in any well-run business, including Defense.

However, most of the factories in question would remain in business, and be run by the same companies, even. Stop your ludicrous fear-mongering and get a grip.

Lyrhawn: the single executives at the top is just the tiniest bit of corporate leadership. The big three are some of the staunchest edifices of ingrained corporate culture.
 
Posted by Christine (Member # 8594) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
I do agree though that people are underestimating the direct and indirect ripple effects the downfall of the auto industry might have.

I don't think so. At least, I don't think I'm underestimating it. Our economy is already in recession and the fall of the big 3 could easily tip us into full-blown depression. We'd see a huge spike in unemployment. Things would be bad. There is no question in my mind about that.

BUT...

1. How will loaning the auto industry money help the situation? The phrase "throwing good money after bad" comes to mind. The big 3 are losing money hand over fist when the price of cars has sky-rocketed faster than inflation over the past 3 or 4 decades. There are problems with the UAW, the suppliers, R&D, the types of cars they offer, the price of cars they offer, the fact that they expect people to continue to buy a car every other year even in the midst of this recession...which is further proof that we haven't escaped the debt-based economy that got us into this whole mess in the first place.

In other words, I doubt that we can bail them out of this.

2. Supposing that there are some set of principles which could be applied to the Big 3 to make them profitable in the VERY NEAR FUTURE (which I doubt), I doubt even more that congress will have the initiative and foresight to apply these measures to the bailout package.
 
Posted by Morbo (Member # 5309) on :
 
One fact I haven't seen in this thread is that labor is about 10% of the cost of an American car. The UAW is taking too much heat recently.

Also, if health care reform is successful next year, that would be a huge cost savings for the auto industry.

fugu, bankruptcy might not make factories disappear, but it would make pensions for hundreds of thousands or millions of retired autoworkers disappear, or be heavily discounted, or wind up in the pension guarantee fund, paid for by the taxpayers.

Christine, are you serious? You agree if the big 3 go broke it could easily trigger a depession not a recession? Then how is it not worth the risk to try and save the industry? The societal costs of a depression would be orders of magnitude greater than the billions in loans the industry is asking for.
 
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
Morbo: that "about 10%" for labor figure leaves out health care (for both active and retired workers), absenteeism, paid days off, and the job bank.

The first, health care, is where the biggest expenses come -- in part because the Big Three are paying for a lot of health care that would be covered under Medicare.

Yes, pensions (well, most likely retirement healthcare) are going to be reduced for former auto-workers. There isn't a way around this.

And if you re-read Christine's post, you'll note that she's saying she expects (probably correctly) them to fail (that is, enter bankruptcy and be forced to restructure) whether or not they are given money, so why give them money? Your answer presupposes giving the Big Three money (and the amount they 'need' keeps going up by billions every week or so) will stop them from having to fundamentally change how they do business in a way that breaks contracts, a supposition she seems to be rejecting, and that I certainly reject.
 
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
And something I failed to respond to: no, health care reform wouldn't be that much of a cost savings for the industry, unless they could get the UAW to give up the better health care the Big Three have agreed to provide and go on whatever is created. And even then, retiree health care would still be a major cost sink (and that already overlapped with government provided health care, as I note above, so I'm not sure the idea that there's gov't provided health care is a strong argument that the Big Three won't keep paying through the nose for it).
 
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
For instance, with the T99 vs the M1A2, the US military has a tank that can be easily mass-produce, while the Chinese military has one they're having problems making very many of. The US tank has been tested in numerous field conditions for nearly thirty years, while the Chinese tank has never been tested in battle. The US tank crews are extremely familiar with the capabilities and limitations of their vehicles, while the Chinese tank crews are quite the opposite.

And it isn't like we couldn't deploy a tank with the same capabilities as the T99 very quickly; we have all of them in various forms on various vehicles. That we don't see any good reason to at the moment on our MBTs might suggest something.

edit: I promise there was a post just above this responding to Blayne's tank talk, by someone else.
 
Posted by BlackBlade (Member # 8376) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by fugu13:
For instance, with the T99 vs the M1A2, the US military has a tank that can be easily mass-produce, while the Chinese military has one they're having problems making very many of. The US tank has been tested in numerous field conditions for nearly thirty years, while the Chinese tank has never been tested in battle. The US tank crews are extremely familiar with the capabilities and limitations of their vehicles, while the Chinese tank crews are quite the opposite.

And it isn't like we couldn't deploy a tank with the same capabilities as the T99 very quickly; we have all of them in various forms on various vehicles. That we don't see any good reason to at the moment on our MBTs might suggest something.

edit: I promise there was a post just above this responding to Blayne's tank talk, by someone else.

*raises hand*
I was disagreeing with Blayne but decided other folks said everything meaningful I was planing to say anyway.

At the risk of escalating US V PLA discussion, I think the fact that many if not most senior PLA officers have zero experience conducting modern warefare is important. The last major military action China was involved in that I can recall is their month long invasion of Vietnam, that ended with tens of thousands of casualties and complete failure. You can't even say they learned much from their mistakes as they didn't stick around long enough to figure out what they were doing wrong.

War tech has evolved in key ways in the last 30 years, and the Chinese have had no opportunity to actually fight with any of this new technology. I can't imagine the Chinese fighting a counter insurgency. But then again, until the last few years America has done a pretty poor job of it too, and we supposedly learned from Vietnam.
 
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
BB: the occupation of Iraq helped us learn many things about fighting guerrilla warfare, but our record in warfare against conventional foes is stellar.
 
Posted by BlueWizard (Member # 9389) on :
 
Just out of curiosity, do you suppose that reduction in primary executive salaries will appear anywhere in the Auto-Maker's restructuring plan? Probably not.

No doubt there is an element of the UAW that has backed the company into a corner. Now some may call them greedy for having done so, but I say, executive greed is probably just as likely a contributing factor. Especially when you pay ECO's and others MILLIONS for failing.

Now generally I'm a union guy, it keeps manufacturers from taking advantage of workers, but unions also act, in good economic times, as a way of taking advantage of manufacturers. Henry Ford knew enough, that if he paid his workers enough money, they would turn around and buy cars. So, he knew he would be getting some of that money back. But the union/manufacturer relationship has become toxic on both sides. They need to find a way in which their actions benefit both sides. In other words, in ways that benefit and sustain but business, but that is also true of overpaid executives. They need to work for group betterment not personal greed.

Certainly, when and if the auto-makers re-organizes they are going to ask for huge concessions from the UAW, but are they also willing to make those same huge concession themselves? If the airline industry is any example, then the answer is NO.

Now to Wall Street. Someone mentioned the lack of flow of 'commercial paper' and the presents of 'toxic loans'. Excuse me, but aren't they at the very heart of the problem the banks and Wall Street are having? Aren't those 'toxic loan' the cause of the lack of flow of 'commercial paper'? As long as people appeared to be making money of this, they were more than willing to ignore that it was build on weaker and weaker loans, which were in turn built on more and more ridiculously inflated house prices.

In Florida, condos were bought and sold 3 or 4 times at ever increasing prices, and those condos in question weren't even built yet. This is rampant inflation caused by pure speculation. As far as I'm concerned, this is a Ponzi Scheme, and anyone should have seen it. But those early in the Ponzi/Pyramid scheme make big money, and eventually, someone is left holding a worthless bag. Someone eventually gets screwed. This was a house of card that could only fall and fall hard, but no one cared because they were convinced that they weren't gone to be the one left holding the bag.

Wall Street and the Bankers engaged in fraud. The loaned money to anyone with a pulse knowing and not caring that the loans were going to be worthless. Then quickly sold those loans to someone else, who in turn sold them to someone else, again and again, each one knowing they were bad loans, each one making money and not caring, because it wasn't them that would have to face the consequences.

I say if we bail out Wall Street, we do it by buying up the good loans, there by freeing up capital, and allowing free flow of money in the market again. Let the crooks deal with the bad loans. They're the ones who made the loans, let them deal with the consequences.

Congress should have grilled the Wall Street Bankers as thoroughly as the grilled the automakers, and demanded that they present changes to the way they do business that would assure this wasn't going to happen again. Actions must have consequences!

I have not doubt that if similar economic chaos had been caused by labor or agri-business, there would have been armed troops in the street forcing these people back in line with business interests. But when the problem is business itself, too many people in control have too much self-interest in preserving a failed system that is making them rich while destroying the country. I notice that most who made the 'immediate urgency' plea for the bail-out were uniformly people who were preserving their self-interests.

Serious demands should be made on anyone getting a bail-out from the government. They must act with consistent and uniform broader benefit, and self-greed and self-interest need to be substantially curtailed.

For what it's worth.

Steve/bluewizard
 
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
Whether or not one thinks executive incentives have been ill-structured, Executive compensation amounts are but a rounding error in the problems the firms are facing. You really can't attribute anything about the decline of the firm to the amounts paid to executives, in firms of this size for salaries and other compensation in the amounts we're talking.

Which concessions are you suggesting the automakers make to the UAW? As for not making concession (assuming there are some it makes sense to make), they've made enormous concessions in the past: indeed, it would be reasonable to say they would not be in such dire straits if they hadn't promised such amazing health care. Why do you think they wouldn't make any now, when their track record has been to make too many?

Buying up just good loans would be a great way to destroy the entire financial industry (and the rest of the country). Do you want me to into more detail as to why? Not to mention that there isn't any simple (or complicated, come to think of it) way to reliably separate "good" loans from "bad" loans. Many of these loans are very complex, and the idea that the gov't is likely to be able to sort them out is not plausible. Especially when the total value of "good" loans even with an extremely stringent set of criteria for being good is probably rather more than the total GDP of the country, much less the amount of money the government has on hand.

And that you think Congress didn't require financial companies to restructure suggests you haven't been paying much attention. The government has taken near-direct control of several of the firms they've bailed out, fired executives wholesale, and required incredible concessions on mortgage policies and the like, just to name a few things. The auto industry restructuring, even if it becomes as extreme as it really needs to be, is going to be small potatoes in comparison.
 
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 
quote:
Whether or not one thinks executive incentives have been ill-structured, Executive compensation amounts are but a rounding error in the problems the firms are facing.
While this is true, I think they're a symptom of the actual problem these firms are facing.

I would firmly support the bailout if every single person in upper management were stripped of everything they own and forced at gunpoint to dance for our amusement. If they don't think it's a small price to pay, they've been spoiled.
 
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
Yes, because childish acts of humiliation are the the way to decide how to spend billions of dollars.
 
Posted by Morbo (Member # 5309) on :
 
Isn't that exactly what the hearings were about? Prattling on about corporate jets and such?
 
Posted by Morbo (Member # 5309) on :
 
Yes, if you think the Big 3 are doomed to fail, it's not worth a bailout.

If failure is only a risk, though, depending on the odds it is worth a bailout.

BTW, the latest AP story has the total amount at $15 billion in loans (though I assume that will rise.) No piddling amount, but only a fraction of the amount already given/pledged to Wall Street.
 
Posted by BlackBlade (Member # 8376) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by fugu13:
BB: the occupation of Iraq helped us learn many things about fighting guerrilla warfare, but our record in warfare against conventional foes is stellar.

I agree with this. I meant that more as while we are still learning, the Chinese have little to no experience either way.
 
Posted by Telperion the Silver (Member # 6074) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by fugu13:
Telp: Bankruptcy wouldn't make the factories disappear in the slightest. Some would, sure, the ones producing more cars than people need. Just like in any well-run business, including Defense.

However, most of the factories in question would remain in business, and be run by the same companies, even. Stop your ludicrous fear-mongering and get a grip.

Lyrhawn: the single executives at the top is just the tiniest bit of corporate leadership. The big three are some of the staunchest edifices of ingrained corporate culture.

Fear-mongering? My city is on the verge of destruction. I'm trying to raise an alarm and share my feelings, which are mostly fear and frustration these days. I'll hold those who say nothing bad will happen to the factories, Detroit, or the USA to their word. Please prove me wrong.
 
Posted by Ron Lambert (Member # 2872) on :
 
Telperion the Silver, I don't think it is wise to give them the opportunity to prove you or me or anyone else wrong who recognizes how bankruptcy of any of the Detroit Three automakers will decimate jobs, in the auto industry and all the cognate industries such as part suppliers and dealers. Those who just shrug their shoulders and say bankruptcy would not be all that bad, and will just allow the car companies to restructure their financial obligations, and not affect jobs much, have no comprehension of the reality that would actually result. Jobs would be decimated. It is far, far better if the car companies are given the bridge loans--emphasis on LOANS--to maintain their cash flow while they are restructuring, with the cooperation of the unions (which they presently have), and can get their advanced new models like the hybrid Volt on the market. It is like the difference between a controlled landing (with the bridge loans) and a crash and burn (with bankruptcy).

Who would want to buy a car from a car company that is in bankruptcy? How many parts suppliers will be able to remain in business providing parts needed by repair shops and auto stores? Letting the car companies go into backruptcy would virtually end the auto industry in America. There would be no recovery for the car companies in bankruptcy. Millions of jobs would be lost, permanently. Anyone who thinks different is confusing the manufacturing industry with the insurance and mortgage industries. They are comparing apples with oranges. Bankruptcy would necessarily be the end of a car company.

When K-Mart filed for bankruptcy protection, they cut hundreds of stores--not all of them the least profitable (some superstores in good locations that had just been built within the past ten years or so were closed). Thousands of jobs were lost. I know of a K-Mart superstore near where I live that had only been built about seven years before, and always had its parking lot nearly full, that not only was closed, but since it had been the anchor store for a shopping center, the reduced traffic in the mall caused half a dozen other stores to close or relocate that had been in the same shopping center, and the mall owners were forced into bankruptcy. Eventually WalMart bought the building, but only after it had set idle for nearly four years. With car companies it would be even worse, because they manufacture the products they sell, and that manufacturing requires continual cost outlay for design, etc., which in turn require a continual inflow of profits from sales. If the car companies are delayed even briefly, they will lose their market share, in most cases permanently.
 
Posted by Orincoro (Member # 8854) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Danlo the Wild:

1. Modern America enjoys the comfort of stupidity.

I think I've spent enough of my adult life listening to people prattle on about "the average American," and assorted bullcrap. Stop and consider, there is no actual average American- you're talking about some kind of composite image based on your very limited sense of the world around you, and conflating that abstract idea with the notion that there are statistics and actual observations that support any of it. There aren't, there never have been, there never will be, and all my life I'm sure I'll hear endless accounts of how stupid and boorish the "average American" is. And I'll have to walk through my life hearing the words, and nodding along as if I know this average person, and understand his plight, or malign him, whatever is called for in the context of whatever stupid conversation I happen to be having.

Look around you- you know stupid people and smart people, and ignorant people and informed people, and skinny people and fat people, but these people do not make an average. As long as you insist that they do, you will perpetuate the idea that something has to be done to appeal to a non-existent entity. Though you personally are no good at convincing anyone of the validity of your claims, you will continue to convince at least yourself of this hopelessly stupid worldview.
 
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
Exercise some reading comprehension, Telp. Nobody has said nothing bad will happen to any of the factories, just not all of them. Furthermore, I've been quite explicit at many times that a lot of pain will be endured. Just understand that the least pain for your city will be a significant restructuring of the auto industry, and the loss of many jobs right now, as opposed to the loss of far more jobs on far worse terms, later. Bad things happen, and the proper response is not to curl up in a ball, start making up things about what will happen (incredible damage to our country's ability to defend itself, for instance), and tell people that if only they hand over more money the bad things will stop.
 
Posted by Lyrhawn (Member # 7039) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Christine:
quote:
Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
I do agree though that people are underestimating the direct and indirect ripple effects the downfall of the auto industry might have.

I don't think so. At least, I don't think I'm underestimating it. Our economy is already in recession and the fall of the big 3 could easily tip us into full-blown depression. We'd see a huge spike in unemployment. Things would be bad. There is no question in my mind about that.

BUT...

1. How will loaning the auto industry money help the situation? The phrase "throwing good money after bad" comes to mind. The big 3 are losing money hand over fist when the price of cars has sky-rocketed faster than inflation over the past 3 or 4 decades. There are problems with the UAW, the suppliers, R&D, the types of cars they offer, the price of cars they offer, the fact that they expect people to continue to buy a car every other year even in the midst of this recession...which is further proof that we haven't escaped the debt-based economy that got us into this whole mess in the first place.

In other words, I doubt that we can bail them out of this.

2. Supposing that there are some set of principles which could be applied to the Big 3 to make them profitable in the VERY NEAR FUTURE (which I doubt), I doubt even more that congress will have the initiative and foresight to apply these measures to the bailout package.

What do you consider the very near future? The auto industry isn't the type of industry that's really designed for very fast turn arounds. Even if they solved all the problems with their leadership, and union contracts, it takes months and years to close factories, shift production lines, ramp production up, and years to roll out new car models.

The bright side I think is that they aren't starting from square one at this very moment like a lot of people seem to be insinuating. It's the credit crunch that caused such a precipitous drop. Ford was doing just fine earlier in the year. Part of the problem is that they were producing cars expecting to keep selling 17 or 18 million units anually when that number was far from sustainable, and in response they've collectively shuttered a lot of factories and cut tens of thousands of workers. They were doing that even before this crisis hit, and without it, I think they would have been fine. Actually I think it's quite possible that Ford will be fine anyway. Ford isn't actually asking for an out and out cash payment, they want a line of credit, so in case things DO get even worse than they are now, they'll have a bit of a cushion.

I really do think that they'll get better though. They've already made some dramatic changes, and have more on the way. If they hadn't made any of the changes they made in the past few years, then I might be more inclined to agree with you. But I'm also perfectly willing to admit that I have an extreme personal interest in this. It's not just Detroit that's dying, it's southeast Michigan as a whole, and far worse than just generally saying the rust belt or the midwest.

People like KoM would be quick to say something along the lines of 'just suck it up and take what's coming to you.' But I can't fathom being that callous. The auto industry is unlikely to be what it was in its glory days, but they certainly have a place in the world if everyone would help them get there. And I think we as a state have a bright future in the renewable energy industry, and are poised to reap huge benefits from the Obama Administration plans. But to everyone saying "too bad" and "let them fail," I have to ask where your sense of community is. And if that doens't work, where's your common sense? As a tax payer you'll fork over a lot more money if they fail than if you help them out.

Throwing good money after bad is one saying. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure is one that might be better.
 
Posted by Sterling (Member # 8096) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by fugu13:
Yes, because childish acts of humiliation are the the way to decide how to spend billions of dollars.

Well, at least we'd be assured of getting something out of it. [Smile]
 
Posted by Blayne Bradley (Member # 8565) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by BlackBlade:
quote:
Originally posted by fugu13:
BB: the occupation of Iraq helped us learn many things about fighting guerrilla warfare, but our record in warfare against conventional foes is stellar.

I agree with this. I meant that more as while we are still learning, the Chinese have little to no experience either way.
Experience is not that important, or more accurately it is better to say that the experience gleaned from Iraq is not important, its like in Ender's Shadow the Battle School was based on what "they learned" from the Second Formic War, which did not last long enough to the natural order of warfare to weed out the incompetents.

The conventional fight between Iraq and USA did not last long enough to give the USA any better experience then they had before, other then Massive Number of Smart Weapons = Looks Good on TV.

In contrast though the Chinese had learned a great deal from US performance at least in 1991 as they underwent the largest and most effective force reorganization ever undertaken by a conventional military in history, and confirm these assumptions in 2003.

Outside of a nuclear exchange neither side possesses the military conventional capability to seriously harm each others mainland. So technically any discussion of the merits of anything is moot, however doesn't detract it is still a fun whatif to discuss what is the better Tank, the T-99 and the Abrams. (The T99 has ana ctive laser defence system, something I don't think the Abrams has)

Also, the Chinese do have UAV's and AWACS, and the Z-10 Attack helicopter.

Also I question America's ability to mass produce Abrams in a hurry, last I checked according to The Rise and Fall by Paul Kennedy a major problem for the Super Powers of the Cold War is that modern defence systems are complicated and sophisticated so that they are consequently considerably harder and more expensive to build fast.

Some things you might be able to mass produce in jiffy but not MBT's.
 
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
Experience is extraordinarily important, and our armed forces have rather more experience than just Iraq, especially those parts of the armed forces that might actually be involved in most wars with China on the other side, unlike our tank crews. For instance, our naval and air force people.

You question our ability to mass-produce the Abrams? We've been making the things for nearly thirty years, and have made something along the lines of 9000 of the things. I don't care how nice the T99 is, when we can field 100 for 1 forces of Abrams against it (and various other Chinese tanks that are inadequate against the Abrams, of course), it'll be squashed like a bug.

Going back to how long we've been producing the Abrams, over 9000 were produced in under 30 years, for an average of over 320 a year. And most of them, by far, were produced in a few large batches, meaning that the number produced in many years would have to have been well over 1000 (for years now the main factory has mostly been producing what's needed to remake M1A1s into M1A2s). So yeah, I think we can mass-produce MBTs, especially as that's only from one factory.

And I rather suspect we'll have little problem developing a counter-measure to the laser defense system, meaning it won't help it shrug off the Abrams' main gun. But the Abrams is going to have a decent chance to shrug off T-99 rounds that the T-99 won't have against Abrams rounds: depleted uranium armor. The T-99 only fires depleted uranium shells, as far as I can tell.
 
Posted by Blayne Bradley (Member # 8565) on :
 
And when was the last time a competant tank crew with proper non defective munitions went head to head with an abrams? Last I checked even the T-72 could knock out an Abrams as being the primary fear of US army planners before 91'.

Your also being very foolish, so what 9000 over 30 years? China has produced at least 2000 to 3000 T-96's over the last 8 years and they're not even trying military modernization has always been the least important overall of China's Four Modernizations.

The ability to produce X many over Y many years is not indictitive of an ability to mass produce them, mass production implies 9000 over 1 year not 30, and does the US army have a full 9000 deployed and in reserves? Nope, most are sold to foreign militaries. How many are in Europe? How many are in reserve? How many can be deployed in a rush?

Considering China's manufacturing base is larger then the US and many other things indictitive of the a Great Powers military-industrial strength (steel production, shipbuilding) the statistics on the matter imply it is China that produces the advantage to build more for less. I at least have a certified expert in the field as my source that you cannot mass produce modern MBT's whats yours? Or are you using an entirely different definition of "mass".

This isn't WWII where we have definate "good tanks" and "bad tanks" such as say taking a Grant to a fight with a Panther, the late Cold War tanks have never had a proper fight with each other and their capabilities and protections (when sufficiently upgraded) that it is impossible to say that an Abrams can "squash" a T-99, 98 or 96 "like a bug" that is a foolish statement. I should also point out that Pakistan was suitably impressed enough with it to make the Al Khalid tank based on it.

100 to 1 where do you get this number from? Your ass? Lets take say China's 2500 of the T-96, plus the 300 or so of the T-99 thats at least 2900 and take 500 of the Type 88 while of dubious use in a 1 v 1 fight can still if competently led ambush the abrams and take it out.

So 3400 to maybe 5000 total Abrams that the US can deploy "in a jiffy" Thats is most definately not 100 to 1.

I still believe you over value the experience gained from both Iraq wars, you were fighting what, a second rate military, without spare parts badly led, couldn't replace any losses and showed no indication on how to use the toys Russia and the US sold them? Oh you know how to kick a punching bag good for you. In every way the US military fought Iraq was done through training and doctrine, there was no real change in how you fought in 2003 then in 1991 you learned nothing other then "hey this works" the same lessons China had just by watching.

Seriously what do airforce and navy people do? Fly a plan to designated area, pick a target and push a button using whatever combination of training know how and gut instinct that is a natural part of the usage of such weapons? How in any way does that differ from training aside from increased risk and that the target actually dies and destroys something of value?

You learned nothing. Maybe the grunts learned how to better combat insurgents but since the very notion of occupying even a mere fraction of the Chinese mainland is a preposterous notion you'll never get a chance to employ anything you learned there.
 
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
China's manufacturing base isn't anywhere near larger than the US's. The US produces over 20% of all manufactured goods in the world, by value. China produces less than 10%. China still hasn't developed good manufacturing techniques for large capital goods, so they're importing almost as much as they export (being a good customer for the US's extremely strong ability to manufacture capital goods, coincidentally).

Your tendency to make up facts (or at least be credulous when people make things up talking to you) is not a good one.

And your laughable denigration of the skills involved in being in the airforce or navy is, well, laughable. Ask some of your Chinese military friends if having experienced naval and air forces matter, then come back and tell me what they say. And we certainly wouldn't be fighting on the Chinese mainland; if it came to that, we'd nuke China out of existence. Any military conflict between us, if it comes to that, will largely be 'minor' conflicts utilizing and in support of proxy states. In such cases, air and sea capabilities will far outweigh MBT capabilities in importance.
 
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
My bad, I guess it was Ford, though I don't really think that detracts from my point. As far as the "silliness" of the hybrid escape goes, I wonder why you think it's silly?

Let's just say it takes Americans to find an expensive way to make an SUV use as much fuel as a small car, rather than simply getting a normal small car (or better yet, a hybrid small car) in the first place).

The Ford Escape makes perfect sense in a silly country, but its still silly.

quote:
Originally posted by Ron Lambert:
... One of my younger brothers is an engineer for GM, and he claims the Volt will be superior to the Toyota Prius.

Did he put his money where his mouth is, in GM stock? That should probably be enough punishment for his proverbial counting of eggs before they hatch.
 
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by BlackBlade:
quote:
Originally posted by fugu13:
BB: the occupation of Iraq helped us learn many things about fighting guerrilla warfare, but our record in warfare against conventional foes is stellar.

I agree with this. I meant that more as while we are still learning, the Chinese have little to no experience either way.
I see that "learning" is now a euphemism for two foreign wars started by the US [Wink]

Even as a Canadian, I'm thankful for the Chinese having no experience either way and I only wish that Americans had no experience either way too. Unfortunately, even after these two wars are over, I wouldn't bet any money that the US won't be doing any more self-initiated "learning".
 
Posted by Blayne Bradley (Member # 8565) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by fugu13:
China's manufacturing base isn't anywhere near larger than the US's. The US produces over 20% of all manufactured goods in the world, by value. China produces less than 10%. China still hasn't developed good manufacturing techniques for large capital goods, so they're importing almost as much as they export (being a good customer for the US's extremely strong ability to manufacture capital goods, coincidentally).

Your tendency to make up facts (or at least be credulous when people make things up talking to you) is not a good one.

And your laughable denigration of the skills involved in being in the airforce or navy is, well, laughable. Ask some of your Chinese military friends if having experienced naval and air forces matter, then come back and tell me what they say. And we certainly wouldn't be fighting on the Chinese mainland; if it came to that, we'd nuke China out of existence. Any military conflict between us, if it comes to that, will largely be 'minor' conflicts utilizing and in support of proxy states. In such cases, air and sea capabilities will far outweigh MBT capabilities in importance.

China possesses at least 20 MIRV capable ICBMs capable of obliterating 20 or so American cities which is incidentally at least 80 million people. Your childish immaturity is also laughable, as well as your inability to name sources.

You can't win the original argument so you try to change the rules typical, also is typical is your inability to reasonable argument.
 
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
 
There are times that I'm extremely thankful for the fact that Blayne is merely a Chinese fanboy rather than actually Chinese.

In the former situation there is at least some hope that Blayne will start worshiping the Protoss or something when Starcraft II comes out. The latter would truly be depressing because we'd be stuck with him forever.
 
Posted by Lyrhawn (Member # 7039) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Mucus:
quote:
Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
My bad, I guess it was Ford, though I don't really think that detracts from my point. As far as the "silliness" of the hybrid escape goes, I wonder why you think it's silly?

Let's just say it takes Americans to find an expensive way to make an SUV use as much fuel as a small car, rather than simply getting a normal small car (or better yet, a hybrid small car) in the first place).

The Ford Escape makes perfect sense in a silly country, but its still silly.

quote:
Originally posted by Ron Lambert:
... One of my younger brothers is an engineer for GM, and he claims the Volt will be superior to the Toyota Prius.

Did he put his money where his mouth is, in GM stock? That should probably be enough punishment for his proverbial counting of eggs before they hatch.

Well, do the Canadians have a cheap way to make SUVs use as much fuel as a car? Does anyone? My point is, if people are going to buy SUVs anyway, what's the argument against making them more fuel efficient? Sure, it would be BETTER if people would buy more cars, but if they aren't going to regardless, I fail to see the error in logic. And I won't get into a discussion in silliness from a citizen of the land of maple syrup and moose. If everyone in the world drove 100MPG cars instead of SUVs, your country would be in a hole pretty quickly, or rather, a tar sand pit. In fact I imagine the steep decline in oil prices has already moved you towards that goal.

As for the Volt, if it performs anywhere near its touted capabilities, I think it'll blow the Prius out of the water. That's a big if, but we'll see.
 
Posted by Blayne Bradley (Member # 8565) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Mucus:
There are times that I'm extremely thankful for the fact that Blayne is merely a Chinese fanboy rather than actually Chinese.

In the former situation there is at least some hope that Blayne will start worshiping the Protoss or something when Starcraft II comes out. The latter would truly be depressing because we'd be stuck with him forever.

Do you actually intend to stop being a disrespectful snot anytime now? Serious find a part of my argument and argue the point with facts, these snide "I am better then thou" sideways comments you can shove them somewhere unpleasant.
 
Posted by BlackBlade (Member # 8376) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Mucus:
quote:
Originally posted by BlackBlade:
quote:
Originally posted by fugu13:
BB: the occupation of Iraq helped us learn many things about fighting guerrilla warfare, but our record in warfare against conventional foes is stellar.

I agree with this. I meant that more as while we are still learning, the Chinese have little to no experience either way.
I see that "learning" is now a euphemism for two foreign wars started by the US [Wink]

Even as a Canadian, I'm thankful for the Chinese having no experience either way and I only wish that Americans had no experience either way too. Unfortunately, even after these two wars are over, I wouldn't bet any money that the US won't be doing any more self-initiated "learning".

I wanted to say this, but it got lost in my other thoughts. I too wish war was something that everyone in the world could lose a few IQ points concerning. But on the flip side, so many other inventions have come out of the war think tank.
 
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
Well, do the Canadians have a cheap way to make SUVs use as much fuel as a car? Does anyone?

Yeah, both Canadians and the Japanese do. We take the SUV, sell it to Americans for big bucks and then buy a small car for ourselves. Its not only cheap, it makes money [Wink]

(or did anyways, before Americans started going broke)

quote:
If everyone in the world drove 100MPG cars instead of SUVs, your country would be in a hole pretty quickly, or rather, a tar sand pit. In fact I imagine the steep decline in oil prices has already moved you towards that goal.
Believe me. I'd be the first one to cheer in a world of 100MPG cars. You know very little about Canadian politics if you think every Canadian from every region feels much pride about the tar sands or how much they pollute.

quote:
As for the Volt, if it performs anywhere near its touted capabilities, I think it'll blow the Prius out of the water. That's a big if, but we'll see.
Thats not the only "if" I dispute. The second "if" I dispute is also whether the consumer will really buy the Volt.

The third "if" I dispute is whether there will really be a GM Volt. Without a bailout, if Telperion is any indication, it may very well be a Honda Volt or a Mitsubishi Volt [Smile]
 
Posted by Blayne Bradley (Member # 8565) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by BlackBlade:
quote:
Originally posted by Mucus:
quote:
Originally posted by BlackBlade:
quote:
Originally posted by fugu13:
BB: the occupation of Iraq helped us learn many things about fighting guerrilla warfare, but our record in warfare against conventional foes is stellar.

I agree with this. I meant that more as while we are still learning, the Chinese have little to no experience either way.
I see that "learning" is now a euphemism for two foreign wars started by the US [Wink]

Even as a Canadian, I'm thankful for the Chinese having no experience either way and I only wish that Americans had no experience either way too. Unfortunately, even after these two wars are over, I wouldn't bet any money that the US won't be doing any more self-initiated "learning".

I wanted to say this, but it got lost in my other thoughts. I too wish war was something that everyone in the world could lose a few IQ points concerning. But on the flip side, so many other inventions have come out of the war think tank.
Have they? Can we say for sure that silly putty wouldn't have been accidentily discovered even if they hadnt been trying to make synthetic oil?
 
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 
quote:
The US produces over 20% of all manufactured goods in the world, by value.
Are we sure that value's the best way to measure this? In theory, if the US produced just one single manufactured good that was worth billions of dollars, we could make similar claims.
 
Posted by katharina (Member # 827) on :
 
There is nothing inherently bad about bigger cars. If they use only as much fuel as a smaller one, why not get a bigger one?
 
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
Tom: if you have a better way . . . ? At least price is a reasonable way of approximating how much people want something.

Anyways, pretty much all manufactured goods produced in the US have rough equivalents from other countries, with the exceptions comprising only a small amount of that total value. So, if you like, we're producing more every year of typical manufactured stuff, measured by number, producing the same stuff other high-industrial countries produce with fewer people, and producing more of the same stuff other high-industrial countries produce than anybody else.
 
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
 
katharina: Because the same improvements that were used to make the larger car use as much fuel as the smaller car can be used to make a smaller car incredibly fuel efficient. Its all relative, not absolute.

i.e. There's nothing special about the current absolute value of the fuel that a current American SUV uses that makes it a special threshold to shoot for.

Ideally we should be trying to minimize pollution against the world average as a temporary milestone, and then to the minimum, not measure ourselves against some theoretical max of how much we "could" pollute if we bought everything we were able to.

fugu13: Shouldn't there be at least some kind of adjustment for purchasing power or something? For example, a perfectly legitimate copy of say Windows XP sold in China carries a substantially different price than in the US. Since a large proportion of manufactured goods produced in each country is produced for the local market, wouldn't this disparity skew the results?
 
Posted by katharina (Member # 827) on :
 
There is a point, however, when the advantage of the bigger car outweighs the advantage of ever-less energy to run. It isn't as if there were NO arguments for a larger car - there isn't anything inherently bad about them. If it can be done well, it should be done.

Following your line of reasoning, no one should ever have a stand-alone house because apartment buildings are more fuel efficient.
 
Posted by BlackBlade (Member # 8376) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Blayne Bradley:
quote:
Originally posted by BlackBlade:
quote:
Originally posted by Mucus:
quote:
Originally posted by BlackBlade:
quote:
Originally posted by fugu13:
BB: the occupation of Iraq helped us learn many things about fighting guerrilla warfare, but our record in warfare against conventional foes is stellar.

I agree with this. I meant that more as while we are still learning, the Chinese have little to no experience either way.
I see that "learning" is now a euphemism for two foreign wars started by the US [Wink]

Even as a Canadian, I'm thankful for the Chinese having no experience either way and I only wish that Americans had no experience either way too. Unfortunately, even after these two wars are over, I wouldn't bet any money that the US won't be doing any more self-initiated "learning".

I wanted to say this, but it got lost in my other thoughts. I too wish war was something that everyone in the world could lose a few IQ points concerning. But on the flip side, so many other inventions have come out of the war think tank.
Have they? Can we say for sure that silly putty wouldn't have been accidentily discovered even if they hadnt been trying to make synthetic oil?
No, but neither can we say for sure that people would have independently figured out all these things either.
 
Posted by Juxtapose (Member # 8837) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by katharina:
There is nothing inherently bad about bigger cars. If they use only as much fuel as a smaller one, why not get a bigger one?

Actually, in some respects I think the size is, inherently, a problem. when cars are on average bigger, then roads and parking stalls have to be bigger. This tends to spread buildings out, which makes alternative forms of transportation less viable, which requires more cars.

While I agree there are benefits to larger cars, I'm having trouble thinking of one that, relative to smaller cars, benefits someone other than the owner/user. I'll also freely admit that the problem I mention above isn't really a problem in rural communities. Which is why I think making trucks and SUVs more fuel efficient is a good thing. Pretending as though consumer needs ought to be uniform is silly, but the "bigger is better" attitude is really one I think we ought to examine more as a country.
 
Posted by twinky (Member # 693) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Mucus:
quote:
If everyone in the world drove 100MPG cars instead of SUVs, your country would be in a hole pretty quickly, or rather, a tar sand pit. In fact I imagine the steep decline in oil prices has already moved you towards that goal.
Believe me. I'd be the first one to cheer in a world of 100MPG cars. You know very little about Canadian politics if you think every Canadian from every region feels much pride about the tar sands or how much they pollute.
While that's true, we've also grown pretty accustomed to balanced budgets. Look at how effective the Conservatives were in the last election at painting the Liberals' (well, the Liberal leader's) Green Shift proposal as dangerous to the economy.

The budget was balanced back when oil was in the $30-40/barrel range, though, so I don't think it's accurate to attribute our current slide toward a FY2009 deficit solely to the decline in oil prices. I think it has at least as much to do with the economic meltdown in the U.S., given that the lion's share of our manufacturing exports go to the U.S. Declining commodity prices don't help, but on their own they shouldn't be enough to tip us into deficit unless the Conservatives' recent tax cuts were big enough to tip the balance (I'm not sure of the revenue loss numbers for the tax cuts, which I opposed).
 
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
 
quote:
While I agree there are benefits to larger cars, I'm having trouble thinking of one that, relative to smaller cars, benefits someone other than the owner/user.
Carpooling.
 
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
Mucus: there are a number of methodologies that can be applied, but purchasing power parity is one suitable for income, not production.

In this case, price is pretty reasonable, because a lot of things we produce are bought in China (since China's ability to produce capital goods is still tiny), as well as other countries in the world at all levels of development. That is, if we were to adjust their goods upward due to being more valuable in relationship to what else could be bought, our products (at least the ones going to China and similar nations; the methodology is arguable) would need to receive the same adjustment.

The typical ppp adjustment would also be based on goods it doesn't really make sense to adjust manufactured goods based on -- food and the like. And doing an adjustment based on local prices of equivalent manufactured goods would result in much less adjustment.
 
Posted by Juxtapose (Member # 8837) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by mr_porteiro_head:
quote:
While I agree there are benefits to larger cars, I'm having trouble thinking of one that, relative to smaller cars, benefits someone other than the owner/user.
Carpooling.
I concede the possibility, but I doubt it amounts to a significant difference. I suspect the number of 5+ passenger carpools doesn't amount to a big slice of the pie.

[ December 08, 2008, 12:23 PM: Message edited by: Juxtapose ]
 
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
 
twinky: Erm, yes. I agree.

Juxtapose: The 5+ carpooling is a bit of a red herring since the Ford Escape and a typical small car both have legal seating for the same number of people, 5. At least here in Canada.

Granted, you could successfully make the argument that because Americans are statistically more obese, Americans require a larger car for five people than the rest of the world would, but thats just a whole different discussion on what we mean by need.
 
Posted by Architraz Warden (Member # 4285) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Juxtapose:
quote:
Originally posted by mr_porteiro_head:
quote:
While I agree there are benefits to larger cars, I'm having trouble thinking of one that, relative to smaller cars, benefits someone other than the owner/user.
Carpooling.
I concede the possibility, but I doubt it amounts to a significant difference. I suspect the number of 5+ passenger carpools doesn't amount to a big slice of the pie.
Try being 6' 6" and shopping for an import in the 1990's and early 2000's. Thankfully, as a whole ergonomics are getting better for small cars, and I can at least sit in them now without craning my neck to either see out of the windshield or keep my head from wedging into the roof.

I chose a full-sized sedan over mid-sized this past time around because in the mid-size, which I could fit comfortably, there was literally (I measured), less than 3.5 inches between the back of the driver's seat and the rear seat. And I was regularly driving three people around in addition to myself, so a 3-seat car wasn't a palatable choice.
 
Posted by Jhai (Member # 5633) on :
 
I think that counts as a benefit to the owner/user.
 
Posted by Architraz Warden (Member # 4285) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Jhai:
I think that counts as a benefit to the owner/user.

Dean or Tasha, the people who regularly had the back seat, would probably disagree it was a benefit exclusive to me.
 
Posted by Jhai (Member # 5633) on :
 
Users, aren't they? [Smile]

I'm not saying it's not a legitimate concern at all, but just that it doesn't particularly help others not associated with you.
 
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
 
Sure it does, if being able to ride in relative comfort in his back seat keeps them off of the road in a separate car.
 
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
 
(For the record, a Toyota Camry Hybrid which is a relatively large car which should count as a full-sized sedan still posts significantly better fuel mileage than the Ford Escape (either four wheel drive or not)

For those people that truly are larger and are shopping for a hybrid, that might be a suggestion. Nonetheless, I don't think 6'6" people were exactly what Juxtapose had in mind when he was talking about large slices of pie, so this is a bit of a digression)
 
Posted by Architraz Warden (Member # 4285) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by mr_porteiro_head:
Sure it does, if being able to ride in relative comfort in his back seat keeps them off of the road in a separate car.

This was the what I was going for. Headed to meetings / lunch / whatever from work, my car was the only choice that wound up with us taking one vehicle. The alternative was to take Dean's benchseat Dodge Ram and Dan's small Audi that could feasibly seat three (for the aforementioned reasons). And we did just that on occasion, like when my car was out of gas or had a flat.
 
Posted by Juxtapose (Member # 8837) on :
 
quote:
Juxtapose: The 5+ carpooling is a bit of a red herring since the Ford Escape and a typical small car both have legal seating for the same number of people, 5. At least here in Canada.
Oh, I was talking about large cars generally, since many SUVs and vans can seat 7-8.

Architraz Warden, that's perfectly fine. I've been in cars that were too small for me, and I'm only 6' even. As I said earlier, I'm really not trying to argue for a one-size-fits-all system.
 
Posted by Ron Lambert (Member # 2872) on :
 
Mucus, the Ford Escape Hybrid is an SUV. I don't think it is fair to compare it to a Toyota Camry Hybrid, which is a mid-sized sedan. Unless you have figures on the curbside weight of each vehicle for comparison.
 
Posted by Jhai (Member # 5633) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by mr_porteiro_head:
Sure it does, if being able to ride in relative comfort in his back seat keeps them off of the road in a separate car.

Good point; I didn't think of that. Maybe it's 'cause we've been the only ones with a car in our urban group for awhile, so the idea of multiple vehicle transportation did not occur to me.
 
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
 
Ron Lambert: I think you misunderstand me. The Camry Hybrid note was in reference to Juxtapose and AW's exchange in finding a car that can seat five people comfortably for carpooling. It was not in reference to SUVs in general.
 
Posted by Juxtapose (Member # 8837) on :
 
And actually, the Escape is actually a pretty fair comparison to the Camry (2008 hybrid models), both in terms of curb weight and interior space, which is a little surprising to me.

EDIT - interesting, it looks like Hybrids are generally several hundred pounds heavier than non-hybrid models. I assume it's the weight of the battery.
 
Posted by Lyrhawn (Member # 7039) on :
 
It is. They try and lighten the weight everywhere else when they can, but those batteries are crazy heavy. One of the benefits that GM hopes to reap from the Volt is that it'a considerably lighter than you'd expect for its size, which comes from reducing the weight of the frame and such and from the reduced weight of the battery pack.
 
Posted by katharina (Member # 827) on :
 
Is it still safe?
 
Posted by Juxtapose (Member # 8837) on :
 
It's scheduled for 2011. I'm not sure they've completed safety testing yet.
 
Posted by Ron Lambert (Member # 2872) on :
 
If I understood correctly what my brother (who is a GM engineer) tried to explain to me, the advantage and difference of the Volt to conventional hybrids is that the car is always powered by the batteries, not the gasoline engine. The gasoline engine that charges the batteries runs at a constant speed, optimum for fuel efficiency. How this translates into final gas mileage efficiency, I have not heard. As Juxtapose said, it is scheduled for 2-3 years in the future.
 
Posted by Lyrhawn (Member # 7039) on :
 
Which is why calling it a hybrid in the traditional sense might not be fair. It's really an electric car, with its own on board power plant if you need it. One of the problems they've had to focus on is testing to see what happens when a few gallons of the same gas sit in your tank for weeks or months at a time, which they think will happen from people charging the car up every day.

They've spent a lot of time coming up with more energy efficient amentities too, from the AC and heater to the radio, trying to make sure that the things that don't actually make the car go aren't sucking up all the juice so they can get every mile out of the batteries that they can.

The original shape was dramatically changed because it wasn't right for wind resistance, so after a lot of wind tunnel testing they came up with the best model to reduce drag and increase efficiency.

Right now a lot of the main work is really being done on the batteries. They have prototype packs from both of the finalist suppliers, A123 and Continental. They're currently working in mules with a Malibu frame to test them in real world conditions, and elsewhere they're rapidly charging and depleting them in extreme cold and heat to make sure the batteries can survive thousands of charge and deplete cycles in extreme temperatures without losing capacity.

They're also in a fight with the EPA over mileage standards. The EPA wants to create a whole new set of rules to test them that wouldn't take the electric part of the car into account at all. GM thinks it's unfair to not take that into account since it's really an electric car, and it actually gives hybrids an unfair advantage in advertising. I'm mixed on that one. I think the electric part should absolutely be taken into account, but I also think it's valuable to know what kind of gas mileage it gets once all the juice is gone.

Also, technically the engine won't "charge" the battery while the car is in motion. When the battery gets down to a certain charge level the engine will kick in to keep the car running, but it won't charge the battery back up and then turn off. It will keep the car moving until you turn it off and recharge it from the wall, or at least that's what I've read.

I don't believe they've really crash tested it yet, but I'm sure they are taking safety into account, especially when it comes to the battery. One of the big issues that had to be overcome in the battery technology is that these types of batteries previously tended to be a bit unstable and had a tendency to ignite. But both companies say they have fixed the problem. Plus they both have different chemical designs for their batteries, they aren't identical technologies, but I won't even try to go into the differences. I could regurgitate it, but I don't pretend to understand it.

What's funny about this is that both Toyota and Honda are jumping up and down claiming that the auto industry isn't ready for the Volt, that LION batteries aren't ready yet, that the whole thing is a big mess, but at the same time they are trying to push out their own plug in hybrids (still traditional hybrids but with bigger batteries), and they're also starting to sink money into R&D for their own version of the Volt. GM trying to leapfrog everyone else technologically. I don't know if it will work or not, and frankly if it doesn't I really do think they are sunk. They're basing a big part of their reorganization around the platform that the Volt is built on, and on the Volt being a game changer, and they're spending billions on this single car just to make it happen. If it flops, I think they're screwed.

But I don't think it will flop. The price point is going to be a little high, but people bought $100K Teslas just because they were electric. Like most things, the people who can afford it will buy it, and when they can scale up and bring the price down, the rest of us will be able to afford it in time. A massive government tax credit certainly helps.

There's still a long way to go, but it's promising, and they're certainly committed to it. It could still turn out that the battery technology isn't quite there yet, but isn't this exactly the sort of thing that we want the Big Three to at least try to do? Seems like it's pretty hypocritical for anyone to bash them for doing what everyone has been bashing them for NOT doing.

I'd say two years is a fair guesstimate by their latest in house estimates. They plan to start production in late 2010 I believe. There's already a waiting list long enough to consume the first year's worth of production.
 
Posted by Ron Lambert (Member # 2872) on :
 
Does anyone here know how much effect air conditioning has on hybrids? I especially wonder whether A/C will be feasible with the Volt. I suppose it could run off the gas engine.
 
Posted by Lyrhawn (Member # 7039) on :
 
Hybrid ACs are a little more efficient than the average car is. But either way it hurts your gas mileage.

There will be AC on the Volt. Like I said, energy efficient extras has been one of the biggest breakthroughs they've had to make on the Volt, to make sure that you CAN run a car with the AC and radio going and still get your 40 miles to a charge. It'll be uber efficient.
 
Posted by Ron Lambert (Member # 2872) on :
 
That sounds good. Typical serendipity: when you innovate, pushing the envelope in one direction, more benefits spin out from it.

Has anyone noticed that the most outspoken Republicans against the Detroit Automaker bridge loan (you can tell which side of the issue someone is on by whether they call it a bridge loan or a bailout), are southerners? This leads me to suspect that the hostility toward the Detroit automakers is at least partly a South vs. North resentment, since it was the manufacturing industrial might of the North that finally crushed the South in the Civil War. Perhaps this is a way for the southern Republicans to "get even."
 
Posted by katharina (Member # 827) on :
 
[Roll Eyes]
 
Posted by Architraz Warden (Member # 4285) on :
 
The southern states are also at-will employment states, where many European and Asian car manufacturers have their American manufacturing plants. Those plants (and companies) are quite safe, and will neither require or receive any of the bailout. So why should the southern senators force their constituents to pay for a loan to save the competitors of some of their major employers?

If you'll notice, many southern and western democrats are leaning in a similar fashion, while the great lakes republicans are clamoring for assistance.
 
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
 
I think Canada is in a slightly different situation. Much of our auto industry is concentrated in Ontario and IIRC it actually comprises a bigger percentage of our GDP (roughly double) than in the US. There was some news back a few years (2005?) when we surpassed Michigan in absolute auto production numbers for reasons such as cheaper health care costs and the growth of Japanese factories (i.e. whereas in the US, Honda and Toyota build in the south and shift production away from Michigan, in Canada they just build in Ontario next door to the American plants, so the shift is basically a wash).

Politically, the Ontario premier is more enthusiastic about a auto bailout than his Quebec and BC counterparts who have no auto manufacturing, but have hard hit forestry industries, due to the US slowdown in house construction I suppose. But the geographic split seems to be less contentious than the split the latter two posters are describing in the States.

In any case, I'm in Ontario so geography is not an especially effective predictor.
 
Posted by Ron Lambert (Member # 2872) on :
 
Architraz Warden: Don't you mean "Alcatraz"?
 
Posted by Architraz Warden (Member # 4285) on :
 
Negative. Architraz was the nickname for our (and several other's) College of Architecture building, in that our major kept us just as incarcerated as inmates would be.

My last year of grad school, I was a TA as well as the student in charge of the Architecture print lab. I promoted myself from an inmate to a warden. Hence, Architraz Warden.

(Amending Archi- to everything is a tradition of Architecture... Architraz, Architorture, Archibabble, etc. It's our cultural payback to the world for deciding architecture needed to be usurped for unrelated technological professions.)
 
Posted by Lyrhawn (Member # 7039) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Architraz Warden:
The southern states are also at-will employment states, where many European and Asian car manufacturers have their American manufacturing plants. Those plants (and companies) are quite safe, and will neither require or receive any of the bailout. So why should the southern senators force their constituents to pay for a loan to save the competitors of some of their major employers?

If you'll notice, many southern and western democrats are leaning in a similar fashion, while the great lakes republicans are clamoring for assistance.

Which is why Dick Shelby is the leader of the anti-bailout movement. There was an article on the news last night about a couple different groups trying to form "Boycott Alabama" movements, by not visiting the state or buying anything purchased there if they are successful in blocking the legislation.

On the one hand, sure, it's a fair argument to say why should Alabama tax payers help workers in a rival company in Michigan, but flip it around. Why should Michigan tax payers pay for hurricane relief when hurricanes come through and destroy the Gulf areas of Alabama? They were the idiots who chose to live in a much more expensive to repair location that's prone to damage, but WE have to pay for it? The argument goes both ways for a lot of things. Some times we're 50 states and sometimes we're one country, but it seems pretty selfish to try and make those distinctions only when it benefits you. That's how nations start to break down. It's also stupid from a couple other viewpoints. Out of work Michigan workers will cost Alabama taxpayers in a number of different ways.
 
Posted by Architraz Warden (Member # 4285) on :
 
*Lengthy passionate yet illogical response omitted*

I both agree and disagree with you Lyrhawn. No company should be too large to fail, and no state should be so reliant upon a single industry that downturns in that industry raise the specter of bankruptcy. The threat of failure simply cannot be a bluff if we're going to call this

I agree that all the Big Three's employees being unemployed would be a massive burden to the nation. But I also think that even in spite of the economic situation, the Big Three (the decision makers that is) have brought this upon themselves.

They are so absurdly unsustainable as corporations that our MBA thesis class almost six years ago centered around "How should Ford, GM, and Chrysler dig themselves out of this hole". One of the groups (that had GM) suggested they declare bankruptcy, made a very sound argument for it, and feared our professor was going to fail them for it. It seemed extreme as a suggestion then, but I'm really starting to think that they may have hit the nail on the head with their suggestion.

A 100 year legacy is something to be proud of if you've dedicated that duration to adaptation and innovation. The moment you stop, every year is another link of chain getting that much closer to binding you to an anchor. This loan may be just the lifeline they need, or it could be a band aid trying to six a severed limb. The danger comes from the gorilla in the room, in the form of 20, 30, or even 50 years of mismanagement they must fully overcome to step back from the grave.

Politics is all about perception. It's easy to rail against $15b to save a perceived rival, and hard to rail against $8b for FEMA, particularly when since the Big Three's backyard took the lion's share last year during the floods. Is it right, that's debatable. But even living in a place effectively free of both industry and natural disasters, I feel less qualms about my tax money going towards disasters.
 
Posted by Orincoro (Member # 8854) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Ron Lambert:
If I understood correctly what my brother (who is a GM engineer) tried to explain to me, the advantage and difference of the Volt to conventional hybrids is that the car is always powered by the batteries, not the gasoline engine. The gasoline engine that charges the batteries runs at a constant speed, optimum for fuel efficiency. How this translates into final gas mileage efficiency, I have not heard. As Juxtapose said, it is scheduled for 2-3 years in the future.

This is a very significant difference. Plug in hybrids have a fuel efficiency dependent upon driving habits. For instance, some designs I've heard of would run off the battery exclusively for 50 miles, so if you drive under that distance in a day (most do), you would burn no gas. When the gas generator went on, you would be burning about one gallon for about every 50 miles, and that rate would be fairly constant, because the battery would always be charging at the same rate. It's fabulously efficient when compared to internal combustion.
 
Posted by Lyrhawn (Member # 7039) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Architraz Warden:
*Lengthy passionate yet illogical response omitted*

I both agree and disagree with you Lyrhawn. No company should be too large to fail, and no state should be so reliant upon a single industry that downturns in that industry raise the specter of bankruptcy. The threat of failure simply cannot be a bluff if we're going to call this

I agree that all the Big Three's employees being unemployed would be a massive burden to the nation. But I also think that even in spite of the economic situation, the Big Three (the decision makers that is) have brought this upon themselves.

They are so absurdly unsustainable as corporations that our MBA thesis class almost six years ago centered around "How should Ford, GM, and Chrysler dig themselves out of this hole". One of the groups (that had GM) suggested they declare bankruptcy, made a very sound argument for it, and feared our professor was going to fail them for it. It seemed extreme as a suggestion then, but I'm really starting to think that they may have hit the nail on the head with their suggestion.

A 100 year legacy is something to be proud of if you've dedicated that duration to adaptation and innovation. The moment you stop, every year is another link of chain getting that much closer to binding you to an anchor. This loan may be just the lifeline they need, or it could be a band aid trying to six a severed limb. The danger comes from the gorilla in the room, in the form of 20, 30, or even 50 years of mismanagement they must fully overcome to step back from the grave.

Politics is all about perception. It's easy to rail against $15b to save a perceived rival, and hard to rail against $8b for FEMA, particularly when since the Big Three's backyard took the lion's share last year during the floods. Is it right, that's debatable. But even living in a place effectively free of both industry and natural disasters, I feel less qualms about my tax money going towards disasters.

I have a hard time seriously arguing against disaster relief, but after the relief keeps going to the same areas over and over again, I start to wonder why there are still people living there that constantly expect the rest of us to continue to pay to clean up after their poor settlment decisions. And it may be that those decisions were made decades ago (not unlike some business decisions made by the Big Three), but it doesn't change the fact that they never really learned from changing circumstances does it? When you get to the nitty gritty, if we're going to give someone money because they just lost their home due to a flood or hurricane, we might as well give it to the guy who is about to be just as homeless becuase his job evaporated and there's nothing else for him to do. In some ways that should be the easier argument to make.

But I'm also of an apparent minority decision that not everything about the Big Three's situation is their own fault. They wouldn't be where they are now if not for the credit market collapse. They'd already started to institute many reforms a few years ago before this most recent crunch time appeared. That and the fact that the shift from a demand for SUVs to a demand for cars came so rapidly that it was hard for them to adjust, but even given that they still came up with several great selling small cars. It's not that they don't have them, it's that no one wanted them until now and they're rushing to catch up with a quickly shifting consumer market.

I think if the credit collapse hadn't happened, they'd have had a rocky but realizable road to being good profitable companies. Ford was already well on its way before this happened, and that's probably why they are the best off. Bu they got kicked when they were down. The ones doing the kicking, the credit industry, got billions of few strings attached dollars with lax oversight, while the ones who got kicked and did no worse than them, arguably they did much better, are being scrutinized and humiliated for public spectacle and political posturing while asking for just a tiny fraction of what the banking industry is having handed to them.

The question before everyone is: Will the Big Three return to viability? I think the answer is yes. Everyone keeps saying "well where is their plan?" and I'd point you to the past, not the future (the recent past anyway). They've shut down and retooled factories to reduce total output and switch from SUVs to cars, they've slashed labor costs, including expensive legacy costs, and they've dramatically increased quality. The benefits reaped from such changes don't happen overnight, they take awhile, and in an industry like the auto industry, sometimes that means years. But they are responding to the demand for more efficient cars with better fuel economy, more hybrids and even electric cars, and are cutting costs across the board.

Public perception seems to be that only a month ago they all of a sudden realized there was a problem and are scrambling to fix it. Maybe it's the false stereotypes being spread around as supposedly long held truths that bother me more than anything.

And for the matter the casual indifference with which a lot of people are treating the millions of people who are barely treading water and will drown without some sort of rope thrown to them. "Let em fail" sounds sickeningly callous to us who actually live in Michigan, and I can say, without much pride and a little sadness, that if somewhere down the line one of those "let em fail" people lives in a state that needs help, I'll rail to my Congressmen 24 hours a day that they be told to just suck it up and bear it like we were told to, and I'll also move to support those that supported us. I don't feel particularly proud of such a vindictive, retaliatory mindset, and I wish I could say I'd rise above it, but frankly I'm too shocked and pissed at how callous, selfish and ignorant many are being about the potential pitfalls involved in this situation.
 
Posted by Architraz Warden (Member # 4285) on :
 
As I said in my previous post... people living on the coast pay hefty fees in insurance to live in such regions. Have the Big Three paid additional taxes above and beyond to preemptively defer some of the $34b they're asking for?

Yes, I'm probably being a short sighted and cold hearted bastard, but I'd rather see that money go toward infrastructure projects than a bridge loan that stands a not insignificant chance of being defaulted on.

Their future viability, though, is partly where we agree. Ford has made amazing strides in the past years. GM has some amazing and industry changing ideas in development. Chrysler never truly got their partnership with Daimler working, and are now relearning the ropes as a private entity.

That being said, they've had what look now like the right ideas before, and never followed through with them. All three need to end their badging ambiguity. GM got rid of Oldsmobile, but needed to continue the streamlining and drop two or three more 'brands' (what does Saab even do now). The rebadging of a car with superficial changes (Saturn Sky and Pontiac Solstice, Any GMC product and it's Chevy twin, etc) simply dilutes a brand. Toyota is known for their efficiency, and limit their cost effective options to Scion, and Luxury to Lexus. There is a very strong brand identity there. Honda and Acura are similarly distinct. Those lines as so blurred in Ford and GM, they may have four nearly identical cars competing with each other, each sharing some components but with different assembly plants for some lines (which is what they're retooling, adapting and closing right now).

GM also had an amazing idea with Saturn. As a whole-owned but independently functional company with it's own plants, employees, and culture, Saturn was on it's way to developing a strong identity, and working out the kinks on its own. Instead, every generation of Saturn became closer to another Chevrolet or Pontiac clone. Instead of having an established method for spinning off companies to be individually viable, GM is back to the status quo while Toyota gains the benefit from GM's trials and tribulations, and is doing spectacularly well with Scion (this in spite of truly horrific looking designs it's first generation).

And no matter how much better they have gotten, GM will still take the approach of "We know what our customers want, even if they aren't asking for it." SUV's were a strong case of this. If you want a better example, look no farther than the Pontiac Aztek. With a little more focus, it could have been a competitor for the Subaru Outback (which still has almost no direct competition), but it was a shotgun approach to design, and had absolutely no standout feature aside from it's near-Pacer hideousness.

All of the Big Three were horribly naieve in the early 2000's. The first time they offered "Employee Pricing" or "0%" interest, they started down a slippery slope that had no where to end but where we are now (albeit a bit accelerated). Offing such incentives creates almost no new demand, it simply steals what demand you were going to have in the future quarters and moves it up. When they did this the first time, the only way they could get their sales to rebound was to do it again. Eventually, conditions weren't going to be favorable to someone to buy a new car every few years, and they would suffer a significant drop in sales. They faced that this past year, and they'll face it again next year. If they'd trimmed production in 2001 instead of front loading their sales, they would have had a better chance at a smooth sales curve instead of the peaks and valleys they had (and a valley which they currently are having a hard time climbing out of).

All this being said, I'm actually amazed at the changes Ford has made towards change. They've taken an amazingly conservative path (efficiency over innovation), but it is absolutely working for them, and the lower gas prices now will play to that strength.

I currently own a 2003 GM car. It has been back to the dealership once under an optional recall that wound up with nothing being changed. Knock on wood, five years later and the only thing that has happened to the car is that the hi-beam lever doesn't set right every so often. This speak volumes towards the improvements they've made towards reliability. And the Malibu probably is the best mid-sized car on the market right now. At the very least, it's the first American car to compete with the Japanese on their own terms. It's a bit unfortunate (and baffling) they kept a name that had such a negative reputation the decade before.

I stand by my earlier thoughts. I think the Big Three will become viable and profitable manufacturing operations again (in this country). But they have miles to go before they sleep, and I'm not the least bit convinced that Bankruptcy is such a bad thing for them. Bankruptcy exists so a company isn't buried by it's past decisions with no hope of recovery, and while penalized, has a chance to start anew with most of their existing capabilities intact. Ford should stick it out. Chrysler is owned by a private venture company now, they need at least a chance to decide where they want to go. GM should probably declare bankruptcy, and use the opportunity to shed Saturn, Pontiac / Buick, and Saab (either eliminate them, sell them, or spin them off into independently run entities). I don't think GM will have the ability to do what's required while struggling to hang on to their status quo, and they'll slip farther and farther into the hole.

But, to be frank, the whole SUV and Truck blow up... is their own damn fault. They milked that trend way too far, and held on to it for way too long. When something ceases being profitable isn't the time to evaluate other options, if you're a business that plans to stay in business, you must have better foresight than that.

And don't worry about feeling guilty, Arizona has already gotten our fair share of the national ill will shaft. We ask for federal help with our immense immigration problems, and we get a chain link fence along the border and high tech surveillance system that barely works. So, the state itself has to burden the share.
 
Posted by AvidReader (Member # 6007) on :
 
First, I agree with 98% of what Architraz Warden posted. I think SUVs and trucks still sell and saying they held on too long is a bit unfair. Let's face it, you can't haul farm feed or tow a boat with a mid-sized sedan, and people still need to do both. Americans are still obese, and SUVs have more room and don't make you climb down into them. The market may not have the size it did when they were status symbols, but there's still a place for bigger vehicles.

Second, Lyr, I get you anger. I totally respect it. But I think your complaint about natural disasters is a little much. Everyone gets them. There's no where to live that doesn't have something to worry about.

The south gets hurricanes. Up north it's blizzards. The midwest has tornadoes and floods. The desert gets flash floods. The pacific coast gets earthquakes, mudslides, wildfires, volcanoes, and maybe the odd Pacific cyclone. Alaska probably still has the volcanoes and floods, though you don't hear about them as often. Hawaii gets volcnoes and I think cyclones. Everyone gets drought or too much rain or bad crops or animal plagues.

Yes, people should be more compassionate. But disagreeing about how best to fix the Big 3's problems isn't the same as not caring. It might feel like America doesn't care, but you've certainly seen that the majority of Hatrack does. We just have a broad spectrum of cures. It may not be much comfort, but it's something.
 
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
 
quote:
But I think your complaint about natural disasters is a little much. Everyone gets them. There's no where to live that doesn't have something to worry about.

The south gets hurricanes. Up north it's blizzards. The midwest has tornadoes and floods. The desert gets flash floods. The pacific coast gets earthquakes, mudslides, wildfires, volcanoes, and maybe the odd Pacific cyclone. Alaska probably still has the volcanoes and floods, though you don't hear about them as often. Hawaii gets volcnoes and I think cyclones. Everyone gets drought or too much rain or bad crops or animal plagues.

That's a specious argument. No area is immune from disasters of one type or another, but that is not the same as saying that all areas have equal risk. When was the last time that thousands of people were left homeless in Arizona, the last time Denver was evacuated, the last time FEMA provided housing to residents of New England? Certain areas of this country are unquestionable at much much higher risk of natural disasters than others. There is no argument here

quote:
As I said in my previous post... people living on the coast pay hefty fees in insurance to live in such regions.
This is unfortunately not true. Insurance industry regulations in every coastal state end up giving a heavy subsidy to homes in high risk beach front areas. That subsidy is either passed on to tax payers or to homeowners in lower risk areas. In many areas, people who own multimillion dollar homes end up buying tax payer subsidized coverage that was intended for low income housing that was otherwise uninsurable.
 
Posted by Architraz Warden (Member # 4285) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by AvidReader:
First, I agree with 98% of what Architraz Warden posted. I think SUVs and trucks still sell and saying they held on too long is a bit unfair. Let's face it, you can't haul farm feed or tow a boat with a mid-sized sedan, and people still need to do both. Americans are still obese, and SUVs have more room and don't make you climb down into them. The market may not have the size it did when they were status symbols, but there's still a place for bigger vehicles.

Oh, SUVs and Trucks are absolutely useful vehicles, and they will be about well beyond the immediate future. But, be honest... of all the SUVs or Trucks you see on the roads, how many do you really think have ever towed a trailer? Hauled feed? Ever been on anything more intimidating than a two lane residential road? I certainly wasn't saying they should stop making these, merely that these were an infinitely poor choice to base 5-10 years of your business model on.

quote:
Originally posted by TheRabbit:
This is unfortunately not true. Insurance industry regulations in every coastal state end up giving a heavy subsidy to homes in high risk beach front areas. That subsidy is either passed on to tax payers or to homeowners in lower risk areas. In many areas, people who own multimillion dollar homes end up buying tax payer subsidized coverage that was intended for low income housing that was otherwise uninsurable.

Two issues here...

I'm well aware people choosing to live in disaster prone locations do not cover 100% of the costs they incur for disasters through insurance. But they do pay heavily increased premiums. I have a pair of friends about 30 miles south of Houston that are genuinely worried they won't be able to afford to live there because of Flood / Hurricane Insurance rates alone. And they didn't make a claim during the past two hurricanes to slam into the area.

The problem with that argument is that you're comparing an industry (albeit large industry) to something that a majority of the population of the US is affected by. Almost all of CA's population is in an area that could be devastated by an earthquake. Everyone living within a hundred miles of the east coast could lose their house to a hurricane, and no matter how unlikely, this includes NYC. Denver, and any city in the plains for that matter, is at risk for tornadoes (OKC and Ft Worth anyone?). The truth is that the disaster safe portions of the country are some of the least populated.

And the issue of the wealthy abusing tax breaks and shelters meant for low income families is a whole other argument...
 
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
...
On the one hand, sure, it's a fair argument to say why should Alabama tax payers help workers in a rival company in Michigan, but flip it around. Why should Michigan tax payers pay for hurricane relief when hurricanes come through and destroy the Gulf areas of Alabama?

A few others have noted a few problems with this argument, but I'd like to note a couple more.

First, states don't literally compete in the same way companies do. Arguably, the United States is stronger with both a successful Alabama and Michigan. However, the same is not the same in the business world. Corporate taxes are a sizable fraction of revenue, so its not just taxpayers having to bailout a failed company. The successful company in this case literally has to subsidize in part, their competitor. In effect, we're handicapping a successful company to subsidize a failing competitor, this is pretty bad for a marketplace.

Second, there are unintended consequences to consider. After the financial bailout, you must have heard that more successful American banks simply used the money to acquire smaller competitors while others simply used it to boost their capital ratios.
Unfortunately, there is a consequence parallel to protectionism here. Some smaller American banks and the Canadian banks which survived the subprime crisis relatively unscathed, now had to compete with the larger banks which got cheap federal money at low interest rates.

We can already see that the same effect is shaping up with the auto industry. The Canadian government has effectively committed itself to a bailout that is proportional to a potential US auto bailout in order to just maintain the status quo. Chinese and European auto manufacturers have stopped their criticism of the US auto plan and have started lobbying their respective governments.

Unfortunately, the number of auto industry jobs in the world is rather limited now, so these governments are just stepping on each other for the same jobs. Contrast this with disasters. When the US helps out New Orleans, it doesn't really hurt Sichuan after the earthquake.

That said, if you really believe that it was wrong to repeatedly aid the states affected by hurricanes (and I agree there is some merit to that argument), the ideal thing should be to lobby to discontinue that. To lobby for an auto bailout as payback seems to just be attempting to make two wrongs, in the hopes of making it right.

quote:
Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
...
But I'm also of an apparent minority decision that not everything about the Big Three's situation is their own fault. They wouldn't be where they are now if not for the credit market collapse.

I may note that the "fault" discussion is a bit of a red herring. Its certainly an exacerbating factor for why we *really* shouldn't bailout these particular firms. But its not a sufficient factor. In other words, even if these companies had done nothing wrong it would not be enough to argue for a bailout. After all, thousands of businesses will probably die during this year and the next without being "at fault". We're effectively picking and choosing by doing an auto bailout.

In a free marketplace with healthy competition, not being at fault is not good enough. GM is competing against foreign companies that have planned better for the future (and yes, even Ford seems to have planned better). However, the bailout just intervenes and discourages this kind of planning ahead. Its actually worse than just playing favourites (arguably there are many other deserving companies in the construction industry or the rest of the manufacturing industry), its actually rewarding short-term thinking.

As a small example, when GM uses 0% financing to increase their sales numbers, they are willingly accepting the risks of what happens if they can't raise money on those terms. Thus when Toyota starts aggressively promoting 0% financing now to take advantage of GM not being able to, thats just the flip-side of that risk. If the bailout came earlier, Toyota probably would have seen a smaller relative advantage.
Its not that GM is necessarily at fault for using 0% financing, but Toyota is thinking ahead and its not necessarily wise to interfere in this process.
 
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
 
I didn't quite have room in the previous post, but there is another issue that differentiates disasters.

Consumers literally vote with their dollar in determining which company to support. Some customers are motivated by price and features, but others are motivated by which companies they wish to succeed.
Secondly, investors can decide which companies to support. At the extremes, there are ethical funds that only invest in "green" companies or companies producing moral products.

We're not just asking taxpayers to support companies from rival states. We also asking consumers to support companies they may be boycotting or investors to support companies that they believe are either immoral or bad investments.

People can rightfully encourage the collapse of a company that stands for values that conflict with their own. I'd be pretty horrified if anyone encouraged a disaster.

quote:
Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
...
And for the matter the casual indifference with which a lot of people are treating the millions of people who are barely treading water and will drown without some sort of rope thrown to them. "Let em fail" sounds sickeningly callous to us who actually live in Michigan ...

You're right. This is a major public relations problem for the anti-bailout side. But I disagree that this is necessarily a problem.

Its like triage as a doctor. A doctor shouldn't really let his/her personal feelings affect who to save and who to let die. They should really be looking at maximizing how many lives can be saved as a whole. Maybe there are millions of people treading water in Michigan, but Michigan is not alone in this downturn, there are plenty of jobs in other areas that are also at risk. Is it necessarily wise to give a push to tens of millions of people treading water elsewhere to throw a rope to millions here? Its a tough decision.

In the end, I don't know if its necessarily a fruitful decision to turn this into a regional argument. I don't know that the posters that have spoken out against the bailout are doing so because they don't live in Michigan any more than you're speaking for it because you live in Michigan.
 
Posted by Lyrhawn (Member # 7039) on :
 
Wow. Tons of assumptions and false premises in there.

I'm not going to go through a series of quote boxes, but I'll take your points chronologically so you can follow along.

1. That's already true of a LOT of things. Are you going to argue against R&D dollars for renewable energy because taxes from fossil fuel companies are paying for a portion of it? Any research or funding for anything we do in America likely comes from at least one source that could be harmed by such a venture. If we're going to use THAT as a basis for how we spend money, we'll need to backtrack across at least 50 years of government spending, a lot of which has brought about revolutionary changes for the better in our society. Besides, there are other concerns and circumstances that I think override what you consider to be a main concern. We haven't had laissez-faire capitalism in American in, well, some might argue we NEVER had it, but it's been awhile since you could argue we even really seriously paid lip service to it. The government has been decided what is and isn't important and what is and isn't deserving of protection for a long time, and there's a strong argument to be made that it's served us by and large for the best.

2. You'll have to expand on this. I'm not seeing what the comparison is to banks buying smaller banks.

quote:
That said, if you really believe that it was wrong to repeatedly aid the states affected by hurricanes (and I agree there is some merit to that argument), the ideal thing should be to lobby to discontinue that. To lobby for an auto bailout as payback seems to just be attempting to make two wrongs, in the hopes of making it right.
I was using the aid thing as an example. I wasn't randomly bringing it up like I'm crusading against it or anything. Your wording there makes it sound like I've always supported cutting off disaster aid and that I only support the government auto loans becuase I want to stick it to the south, which is ludicrous.

quote:
In a free marketplace with healthy competition, not being at fault is not good enough. GM is competing against foreign companies that have planned better for the future (and yes, even Ford seems to have planned better). However, the bailout just intervenes and discourages this kind of planning ahead. Its actually worse than just playing favourites (arguably there are many other deserving companies in the construction industry or the rest of the manufacturing industry), its actually rewarding short-term thinking.
I disagree. Well, maybe in theory you're right, but you're talking about economic principles that have regularly been ignored in American history. We can sit around arguing about textbook examples and theories all day, but the relationship between government and industry is rarely that academically correct.

Furthermore I disagree that the government loans encourage stagnation. It would seem that you are suggesting that if they get this money, which only guarantees short term survival in the amounts being discussed, they'll breathe a sigh of relief and then for some reason go back to how they conducted business in the 1990's or 80's. It ignores several years of concerted effort to change their business model and method of doing business. Believe it or not, they aren't ridiculously stupid, nor are they living in a bubble. They're already making the changes or have already made the changes that everyone is demanding of them. All that's left is sustained will and seeing how things come out in the wash.

As to your second post, well, you're positing something in the first part that's hard to argue against since it consists of a very large number of assumptions on the part of consumers. First of all, the Big Three sell more than half the cars sold in the US. They were just making too many cars, so they've scaled back, and have more scaling back to do. Saying we shouldn't spend tax payer dollars on something unless 100% of us agree on it is basically saying the government should never spend another dollar, which coincidentally, not everyone agrees with either. There will never be a spending measure that EVERY American agrees with, and since we're just talking about the 8 or so million Americans every year that for whatever reason choose to buy foreign rather than domestic, that's hardly a controlling interest in the electorate.

On your last point, it's actually not quite like triage as a doctor. You're the one who has specified distinctions between consumers and voters, and between business and government. Government is made up of a diverse collection of electorates as much as it is a single electorate. But let's say, for the sake of argument that it IS like that. Your analogy misses a couple points though. If the industry fails there WILL be a cost to taxpayers, a big one. So really the question is more like, there's two doctors and a lot of patients, then one of the doctors gets hurt. If you sacrifice the doctor, more people will die, but if you save the doctor, people will die, but you'll end up with more doctors to save more people. If the result is the same, why not save the doctor? You're presenting extremely cut and dry arguments.

quote:
Is it necessarily wise to give a push to tens of millions of people treading water elsewhere to throw a rope to millions here? Its a tough decision.
And as it stands, that is NOT the decision before us. If you'd like to explain why you think it is, then go for it, but a small auto loan from the government isn't going to cause tens of millions of people elsewhere to suffer.

Finally, no one has suggested that anyone on Hatrack is posting a certain way because of a region bias. I don't know where you got the idea from.
 
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
1. That's already true of a LOT of things. Are you going to argue against R&D dollars for renewable energy because taxes from fossil fuel companies are paying for a portion of it?

Again, two wrongs don't make a right. If you're asking me whether I'd remove renewable energy R&D dollars in exchange for eliminating ethanol and farm subsidies? I'd do it in a heartbeat. On the whole, I think most business-level subsidies probably do more harm than good.

quote:
2. You'll have to expand on this. I'm not seeing what the comparison is to banks buying smaller banks.
Well, thats kind of the point. They're called unintended consequences for a reason. We didn't know that the banks would squander money before the bailout, we do now. We don't how GM will end up wasting money yet, but you can bet that they will. It always happens when you just throw around these huge sums of money.
That said, we do know that the bailout will spark a protectionist backlash. That much is certain.

quote:
I was using the aid thing as an example.
Hence the *if*.

quote:
Furthermore I disagree that the government loans encourage stagnation.
Then you're a much more optimistic guy than me. Human nature is eternal [Wink]
For example:
quote:
Chrysler found itself on the verge of collapse, largely because high oil prices had made its gas guzzlers unappealing. Company executives and union leaders came to Washington, hat in hand, arguing that Chrysler’s demise would wreak unacceptable damage on the American economy. Congress and the Carter administration responded by arranging for $1.2 billion in subsidized loans. The Reagan administration helped further in 1981 by restricting Japanese imports.

On its face, the Chrysler rescue was a huge success. Under Lee Iacocca, the company came out with the K-car line of smaller vehicles, like the Dodge Aries, as well as the original minivan. By the mid-’80s, Chrysler had repaid the loans. Mr. Iacocca appeared on the cover of Time magazine as “Detroit’s comeback kid,” and his autobiography became a No. 1 best seller.

But if you take a moment to think through the full Chrysler story, you start to realize that it’s setting a really low bar. The Chrysler bailout may have saved the company, but it did nothing, after all, to stop Detroit’s long, sad decline.

Barry Ritholtz — who runs an equity research firm in New York and writes The Big Picture, one of the best-read economics blogs — is going to publish a book soon making the case that the bailout actually helped cause the decline. The book is called, “Bailout Nation.” In it, Mr. Ritholtz sketches out an intriguing alternative history of Chrysler and Detroit.

If Chrysler had collapsed, he argues, vulture investors might have swooped in and reconstituted the company as a smaller automaker less tied to the failed strategies of Detroit’s Big Three and their unions. “If Chrysler goes belly up,” he says, “it also might have forced some deep introspection at Ford and G.M. and might have changed their attitude toward fuel efficiency and manufacturing quality.” Some of the bailout’s opponents — from free-market conservatives to Senator Gary Hart, then a rising Democrat — were making similar arguments three decades ago.

Instead, the bailout and import quotas fooled the automakers into thinking they could keep doing business as usual. In 1980, Detroit sold about 80% of all new vehicles in this country. Today, it sells just 45%.

http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2008/09/lessons-from-1979-chryslyer-bailout.html

The first part seems strikingly familiar. It remains to be seen if the latter part will come true. But as others like fugu13 have aptly noted, the whole point may be moot since the firms will probably collapse in a year, bailout or no bailout anyways.

quote:
First of all, the Big Three sell more than half the cars sold in the US.
This is just plain wrong. See the previous. American auto firms are a minority in their own market and have been for at least a year.

In any case, since the voters disagree (43% favour to 51% against http://www.gallup.com/poll/112993/Americans-Still-Buying-Auto-Bailout.aspx ), since the domestic auto maker market share has been descreasing rapidly like a rock, and the stock market views GM as an awful investment. We should really be asking if the government should be overriding all three of the people, the consumer, and the investor.

quote:
If you'd like to explain why you think it is, then go for it, but a small auto loan from the government isn't going to cause tens of millions of people elsewhere to suffer.
First, the bailout will be between 30 billion and 50 billion. Since when is that "small"? Second, as you've previously noted the downturn is affecting all automakers. Toyota and Honda are both planning to cut production. There would be less of a need to do that if the Detroit auto manufacturers entered bankruptcy. Ultimately, in the short term there are only a limited number of auto jobs. Either the cut happens in Detroit or it is spread out across the entire industry including successful companies. Third, the bailout needs to be paid for which hurts all taxpayers in their wallets.

quote:
Finally, no one has suggested that anyone on Hatrack is posting a certain way because of a region bias. I don't know where you got the idea from.
Its right in the quote that I used. You said that people that opposed the bailout (i.e. "Let them fail") sounded casually indifferent to people who "actually live in Michigan."
There are definitely posters on this thread which are in the "Let them fail" camp and we don't live in Michigan.
 
Posted by AvidReader (Member # 6007) on :
 
quote:
No area is immune from disasters of one type or another, but that is not the same as saying that all areas have equal risk. When was the last time that thousands of people were left homeless in Arizona, the last time Denver was evacuated, the last time FEMA provided housing to residents of New England? Certain areas of this country are unquestionable at much much higher risk of natural disasters than others. There is no argument here
I'm not sure I agree with that logic. Yes, the South taken as a whole probably has to evacuate a couple times a year. Should we abandon a fifth of the land mass of the US when your individual city might see a big storm once a century? That makes no sense.

Hurricanes are expensive because we put so much stuff along the water. I know my home-piece of Florida would love a limit on building. Especially if it keeps folks from Tampa out of the county. We've got 18 million Floridians and two of the top twenty most populated metropolitan areas in the country. Where would you put them all so the hurricanes don't get them?

Wiki's got The South at 109 million people, 36% of the nation's population. We're the most populous region. Stick us all in the West and whatever natural disaster they get will suddenly be the most expensive to deal with. It's the people and property values that's the problem, not which disaster we face.

At least we can see a hurricane coming and get out of the way. I'll take that over tornadoes and mudslides any day.
 
Posted by Lyrhawn (Member # 7039) on :
 
Live up north. We rarely get tornadoes, and when we do they are tiny and cause little to no damage. No earthquakes, no hurricanes, no volcanoes, no mudslides, no tsunamis.

The worst thing to generally hit us is a snow day. A blizzard can be a pain in the neck, but it'll require hot chocolate and some plows and salt trucks, not FEMA and multi billion dollar aid packages.

As far as hurricanes go, states dig their own graves with that. They put little to no effort in sustaining wetlands and barrier islands that for hundreds have years have absorbed vast amounts of the damage that comes from a hurricane's storm surge, blunting much of the damage and reducing the cost. It's not that they choose to live there, it's that they choose to live there in the absolute most careless, destructive, and irresponsible matter possible. I'm surprised they don't seed the clouds off the coast of Africa, it'd close the loop. The wind damage from Katrina was harsh, but what made the city uninhabitable was the storm surge that broke the levees and flooded millions out of their homes. A better levee system would have been better, but the surge never would have gotten over the walls if they had taken care of their ecosystem well enough to preserve those NATURAL barriers to damage.

At least I know that when the once in a million massive earthquake hits California, that those people put a lot of time, effort and expense into making those buildings highly quake resistant, so that smaller more frequent quakes cause little damage.

The Gulf Coast just has no excuse. It doesn't mean that I'd be so callous as to tell a starving refugee that he should have planned better (true though it may have been), but if something happens again anytime soon, I think I'd tie the aid money to a promise that they'd clean up their act in the future. In fact I'm shocked that the last aid package didn't.

[ December 12, 2008, 12:51 AM: Message edited by: Lyrhawn ]
 
Posted by AvidReader (Member # 6007) on :
 
It's Louisiana. How clean are you going to get? The bank I used to work for skipped over the state and expanded in Texas instead so they wouldn't have to deal with local corruption.

I agree with you on the barrier islands. Building anything on land that's unstable and moves at the whim of the breeze and tide is pretty dumb. And what our wetlands and estuaries and rivers need is for fertilizers to be banned. It's the fertilized water runoff that builds algae and non-native plants up to destructive levels and does most of the damage I've seen.

But Katrina and levees was going to happen no matter what. She was a strong Cat 4, the levees were only built to withstand a 3. The barrier islands did their job; they knocked her down from the 5 she had been, but they were completely destroyed. This guy seems to think we're in danger of losing all of southern Louisiana.

quote:
The dikes along the Mississippi river remain intact but most of the land adjacent almost into the city of New Orleans is gone. This extends on a line almost to Morgan City. There is some question if this is an extended “storm surge” (Note no such thing has been observed before) or if the area is permanently gone. The area involved is about 2000 square miles. The entire area of the state south of Baton Rouge is now in danger of sinking into the sea forever. This includes some areas into the State of Mississippi and the ENTIRE CITY OF NEW ORLEANS.
His emphasis, not mine.

As for New England, they get the occasional hurricane as well. Do their building codes demand they're ready for them? Post-Andrew when our laws changed, the hurricanes haven't caused nearly as much property damage. New construction is built to take a Cat 3. Googling "New England natural disasters" got me ice storms, floods, and tornadoes. Googling "New Hampshire flooding" gave me stories of places that had to be evacuated, the National Guard called in, and Red Cross helping the survivors.

In Alstead, NH, 150 people needed shelter out of 1,977. New Orleans had about 30,000 in the Superdome out of 450,000. That's 7.5% versus 6.66%. Now move hundreds of thousands of folks from the south to the north and strain the infastructure. You'll be up in similar numbers in no time.

No where is safe. I think that's our mistake right there. We can't just say, "Things have changed. We'd better adapt to that." We have to run around trying to maintain an untenable status quo forever. If you city is sinking, maybe you should petition the government to offer some kind of land-swap credit. The south usually has large areas of undeveloped land. You'd think everyone would win if people could give up their land in an unsafe area and get an equivilant value of land elsewhere. Incorporate the new area as part of the old city and you're not even losing city population, you're just moving the city.

Thinking we can build in one place along a changing coastline forever is what's going to kill us in the long run.
 
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
 
News update:
quote:
A bailout-weary Congress killed a $14 billion package to aid struggling U.S. automakers Thursday night after a partisan dispute over union wage cuts derailed a last-ditch effort to revive the emergency aid before year's end.

Republicans, breaking sharply with President George W. Bush as his term draws to a close, refused to back federal aid for Detroit's beleaguered Big Three without a guarantee that the United Auto Workers would agree by the end of next year to wage cuts to bring their pay into line with U.S. plants of Japanese carmakers. The UAW refused to do so before its current contract with the automakers expires in 2011.

The breakdown left the fate of the auto industry — and the 3 million jobs it touches — in limbo at a time of growing economic turmoil. General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC have said they could be weeks from collapse. Ford Motor Co. says it does not need federal help now, but its survival is far from certain.

Democratic leaders called on Bush to immediately tap the $700 billion Wall Street bailout fund for emergency aid to the auto industry.

...

The White House said it was evaluating its options in light of the breakdown on Capitol Hill.

"It's disappointing that Congress failed to act tonight," Deputy Press Secretary Tony Fratto said in a statement. "We think the legislation we negotiated provided an opportunity to use funds already appropriated for automakers and presented the best chance to avoid a disorderly bankruptcy while ensuring taxpayer funds only go to firms whose stakeholders were prepared to make difficult decisions to become viable."

That bill — the product of a hard-fought negotiation between congressional Democrats and the Bush White House — was virtually dead on arrival in the Senate, where Republicans said it was too weak in its demands on the car companies and contained unacceptable environmental mandates for the Big Three.

...

A pair of polls released Thursday indicated that the public is dubious about the rescue plan.

Just 39 percent said it would be right to spend billions in loans to keep GM, Ford and Chrysler in business, according to a poll by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. Just 45 percent of Democrats and 31 percent of Republicans supported the idea.

In a separate Marist College poll, 48 percent said they oppose federal loans for the struggling automakers while 41 percent approved.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gbjFY-o07QeryRxtFR3oC1w_v1PwD95112A80

Personally, I kinda wish it went through with both strong demands AND the environmental mandates although it seems like each party is pushing only one of each.

It seems like Bush may have the last laugh anyways, so it might be a moot point.

quote:
The White House said that the US economy could not withstand a body blow like the collapse of the auto industry.

It said that the Federal government may have to step in.

Earlier this year, the US approved a $700bn (£467bn) bail-out for the finance industry, known as the TARP programme. It had previously been reluctant to use this money for other industries.

"Given the current weakened state of the US economy, we will consider other options, if necessary including use of the TARP program, to prevent a collapse of troubled automakers," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

She added that it would be "irresponsible" to further weaken the economy by allowing the Detroit car companies to fail.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7779981.stm

I presume that using TARP funds would alleviate the need for getting Congressional approval. However, only the first half of the TARP program has been approved by Congress and as of last count I think they spent most of it, so it may be tight.

The other option is another Senate pork gambit like with the TARP bill where they add billions in random crap to persuade Senators.

I guess we'll see.
 
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
 
I could be giving them too much credit, but I think that this was a shrewd political move by the Republican Senate.

The Repub strategists must have been doing quite a bit of thinking after getting crushed in the elections. One of the big things that the party has lost is the brand identity with fiscal conservatism. By pushing very hard on this to the point where it was almost guaranteed to have it fall apart, they push it back onto the President, who will now use TARP funds with few strings attached.

This gives them the ability to say "Look, we're fiscal conservatives. It was the President and some of those ex-legislators who betrayed these ideals." while still getting the non-failure of the U.S. auto industry (for a little while, anyway).
 
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by MrSquicky:
I could be giving them too much credit, but I think that this was a shrewd political move by the Republican Senate.

Until the analysis comes out that the cost of inaction by the government (in the form of unemployment benefits, etc) will be as much if not more than the cost of the bailout, since that will render their objection into 'obstruction' at the 'cost of' working class americans.

Or when people start checking out how much of a disparity there is between governmental support of the foreign automakers, such as the support Toyota and Honda get from Japan.

Or when people look at the percentage of the GDP that will be obliterated by this, or when people analyze the fact that the cost of the bailout is pretty much, perhaps a bit less, than what we spend monthly in Iraq.
 
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
 
Samp,
But there's not going to be government inaction. That's kind of my point. The Republicans didn't set up a situation where the auto companies don't get money. They set one up where the auto companies get money, but that they can say that they fought against the liberal policies of the Democrats and the Bush administration.

Yes, if the auto companies didn't get money and went bankrupt and there were enormous financial consequences, this stance would really come back to hurt them, but the main consequence here seems to be that the companies get the aid without anywhere near as many strings and the Republicans can put all that blame on other people while largely avoiding the blame for what would have happened if they had actually succeeded in obstructing this bailout.
 
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
 
It's possible but I'm noting that by Putting Their Foot Down (all political trope style) they've sparked a huge amount of theorycrafting into the pointlessness of inaction, which rubs off badly on them, like they're withholding payment for the sake of schadenfreude that comes at the cost of joes and janes.

This is just a laconic observation that they may more or less cement a bad perspective, as 'obstructionists to beneficial spending' or sommat.
 
Posted by aspectre (Member # 2222) on :
 
"...governmental support of the foreign automakers, such as the support Toyota and Honda get from Japan."

The closest Japan ever got to subsidizing its auto industry was requiring a new replacement if the old engine didn't meet extremely strict pollution standards (ie failed to meet the criteria set for new engines).

Chrysler was in cardiac arrest by the time Daimler-Benz bought it for $36billion. And when Daimler-Benz discovered that they couldn't revive it (ie lost further billions), they "sold" Chrysler to Cerberus* for a token amount (while actually paying Cerberus a few billion bucks to ensure it became dead dead dead) so that the Chrysler retirement-obligations zombie wouldn't eat Daimler-Benz.
ie Daimler-Benz assumed that UScourts would probably enforce pension-protection laws against a financially strong foreign-held company, but would probably allow a US-based vulture-fund to eat the remains (by saddling the US taxpayer with Chrysler's retirement obligations).
Which is why Cerberus hired RobertNardelli to run Chrysler: for his proven ability to gut even a very healthy company (HomeDepot) for fun and profit without triggering prosecution for business fraud.

* "Cerberus...guards the gates of Hades, to prevent those who have [died] crossed the river Styx from ever escaping [death]."

[ December 12, 2008, 02:22 PM: Message edited by: aspectre ]
 
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
 
Well, I guess that is that:
quote:
Ottawa and Ontario will provide an estimated $3.4-billion to the Canadian units of the Detroit Three, while U.S. President George W. Bush will throw a $14-billion (U.S.) lifeline to their parent companies.

Federal Industry Minister Tony Clement called a hastily arranged news conference Friday night to announce the Canadian aid package.

“The seriousness of the situation dictates that we be here this evening,” Mr. Clement said.

...

Mr. Clement would not provide a specific figure, but he said the amount of money in the Canadian bailout represents this country's one-fifth share of the Detroit Three's North American vehicle production and on Canada maintaining that percentage.

“Clearly, this amount of money is meant to be, as the U.S. is finding out, a way to keep the doors open for the domestic auto sector while they continue their long-term planning,” he said.

However, he stressed that the support package would reflect the interests of taxpayers and is contingent upon the auto makers working with their unions and parts suppliers on a long-term solution for the sector. It's also conditional on a U.S. deal coming together.

link

So roughly 110 CDN per Canadian and 50 USD per American, with the Canadian bailout conditional on the US one. I guess it could have been worse.

By comparison the bank TARP bailout was 2833 USD per American and our equivalent was roughly 1666 CDN per Canadian. *sigh* Its a race!
 
Posted by Telperion the Silver (Member # 6074) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by fugu13:
Exercise some reading comprehension, Telp. Nobody has said nothing bad will happen to any of the factories, just not all of them. Furthermore, I've been quite explicit at many times that a lot of pain will be endured. Just understand that the least pain for your city will be a significant restructuring of the auto industry, and the loss of many jobs right now, as opposed to the loss of far more jobs on far worse terms, later. Bad things happen, and the proper response is not to curl up in a ball, start making up things about what will happen (incredible damage to our country's ability to defend itself, for instance), and tell people that if only they hand over more money the bad things will stop.

Reading comprehention? Arent we in a snarky mood.
Aynyway, what have you to say on the subject of the Senators of the south who have blatantly said they're adgenda is not the survival of American industry but the breaking of the unions so they can court foriegn comanies with huge tax breaks... only to have said companies bring in Polish workers on questionable B-1 work visas. And these foriegn comanies have the backing of their governments.
 
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
Surely you have some quotations about desiring to court foreign companies with big tax breaks? I won't even bother asking about the Polish worker thing.

edit: also, the Big Three have hardly been without gov't assistance -- they've had quite a bit, actually. Indeed, I'm proposing giving them more gov't assistance, in the form of bankruptcy protection and reorganization.
 


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