uncle bubba

Bail Out Capitalism, Not Detroit

To those who oppose to Auto Industry Bail out;


In a perfect world of Capitalism only the strong survive and business takes care of itself. But those are not the ground rules we have been playing under. The government has controlled and mismanaged the credit markets with the introduction of the Community Reinvestment Act and followed it up with deregulating and miss managing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to the point that our credit system almost collapsed.
Add to that the deregulation of the futures market that allowed oil to hit $147.00 per barrel and started a consumer driver recession. It is the governments fault, they caused the problem and they should stand good to fix it. Gm has been in a restructure program for the last several years that should reach a majority of it’s goals by 2010. I’m talking about moving the legacy cost of the retirees to the UAW, which with other cuts and changes would drastically improve Gm’s underlying cost
per vehicle. Some say that GM built gas guzzler SUV’s and trucks that the public didn’t want, but that was untrue, an out right lie. They were built due to demand for such vehicles, look at your local Toyota lot and see the number of full size V-8 trucks and SUV’s. Toyota saw the demand and was trying to tap into that large market. It was $4.00 a gallon gas that killed it in less than a month and no company can change
production over in less than 6 months and retool especially with the availability of loans gone. The government subsidized these large vehicles with large tax credits for business owners and drove the demand even higher. Another government mess up. We pay more to other countries in the form of aid to help with our security. Those opposed to helping out our manufacturing base survive the mess ups of the government should ask themselves who will build the tanks and planes the next time we need them. It makes me sick to my stomach to see supposedly grown men and women play these political games and argue over the fate of millions of worker’s future when they caused the problem to begin with. It’s time for our elected officials to get off their, he said she said, politically driven backsides, accept the responsibility that they know is their’s and fix this short term problem.