Re: Another $17.4 Billion WASTED

On Wed, 24 Dec 2008 00:57:13 GMT, Dave Head <rally2xs@xxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, 23 Dec 2008 08:55:01 -0500, edward ohare
<edward_ohare@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


I'm in favor of liquidation.

Are you in favor of the DOW at 1,400, 8% unemployment the next day, a 4% drop
in GDP the next day, and probable deterioration of the situation from that
point on, for quite some time?


Y'know, we should have taken a little pain in 02. But no, W cut taxes
some more and sent out rebate checks. Treating the symptoms instead
of the disease.

So now the disease is advanced, and you want to do more symptomatic
treatment. We could have cut off a hand in 02 and been done with it.
Now its an arm. That's the price today. Put it off and the price
gets higher.

What you don't acknowledge is that the next danger here is that the US
won't be able to borrow money anymore.


In order to make **what** work??????? What?????

Making not losing a very large percentage of our manufacturing base work,
that's what.

This part of our manufacturing base doesn't work.

Yes it does. It needs some tweaking right now, that's all.


Chrysler worth less than nothing... GM lost 65% of its market share
steadily over 40 years... former blue chip Ford qualifying as a penny
stock... you think all it needs is tweaking?




The last depression saw stock values fall a total of 90%. How do you feel
about DOW 1,400?

So we, the taxpayers, are supposed to prop up the stock market too?

Well, if you don't want to have to scramble to stay employed, and keep from
having to live in a refrigerator carton in the alley, yeah...


What if I'm already scambling? What if I'm already unemployed? What
do you say then?



OK, Dave, so what costs less? Paying for unemployment, retraining,
and relocation for a few years or paying auto companies subsidies
forever?

Keeping the auto companies afloat will be light years less expensive than what
happens if we don't.


Subsidize them. That's what you're saying. Vague notions that if we
don't thinks will be worse.

Well... Detroit's initial request worked out to over $5000 per car
sold through Nov this year. Now... I'd go through the cost per laid
off worker for a year or two versus $5000 per car past the horizon,
but your arguments to date have been pretty much "Yea, yea, don't
confuse me with the facts, just give me what I want", so I'm not going
to bother with that.

You should have thought about what you would want today some time ago
when you bought a Subaru.


Plus, you're talking about people that both may not _want_ to do the sort of
jobs that are available after the manufacturing section loses a great
percentage of its bulk, and some may not even have an aptitude for doing such.

If people want manufacturing jobs, they'll have to move to where they
are. Get rid of a couple of automakers, and there will be jobs
farther south working for Toyota, etc. People originally moved from
the south to get off the farms and into Michigan factories. People
can move again.


The jobs these people get, sometimes years later, will pay a fraction of what
they were making.


The taxpayers aren't responsible for subsidizing people's pay.

They will not be contributing anywhere close to what they
were to the tax base, the retail sector, the entertainment sector - we as a
country will be far poorer than we were.

Oh, the old trickle down theory. Didn't work for Bush, or Reagan, and
now years of Republican tax cuts in CA and FL on the promise of a
better economy have failed too. And you're still kicking the line
that Reganomics works.

Y'know, tax cuts only increase business activity if they're high
enough to restrict business activity. The Republican tax policy
assumes that whatever taxes are they are too high. Proven not true.


We may not sink to the status of a
3rd world country,

We might if others won't buy our debt. Might be a good thing... the
rest of the world not having Uncle Sam's boot stomping on them at the
whim of any lunatic we put into the White House.

but we'll never be what we have been only recently, and
we'll _never_ get this capability back. Nobody's going to restart an industry
with that much infrastructure requirement - not Bill Gates, Not Warren Buffett,


One of the points is that Detroit's infrastructure is old, obsolete,
decayed, and that's one of the reason's they're having trouble. Gee,
Dave, part of Chrysler's Kokomo transmission plant was originally a
Maxwell plant.

Not Donald Trump, not all of 'em put together. We lose this industry, we say
goodbye to a formerly enjoyable standard of living.

Well, we could maintain a lot of it if we quit pissing money away on
an offensive capable military and made it actually for what it says
its for: defense.



And that will be _all_ of us, not just the poor damn auto workers. The country
will just be less rich, and the money needed to run it will necessarily come
from the rest of us, and that's taxes as well as prices of everyday things from
food to fuel to movies.


I fail to see how subsidizing inefficient companies and overpaid
workers helps the rest fo us.


We have to have those taxes to pay for our bloated military that is
mislabeled as a defensive military but is really an offensive
military.

Bitch, bitch, bitch...


That's real argument <smirk>



$40,000 for an economy car?

Obviously its not an economy car. Its a pretty sleek leader of a new way of
doing cars.


Let's see... no performance... not roomy... yep, an economy car.
Yikes! $40,000?



Just what we need to be doing - building weapon systems that we have to import
from some other country (that someday may not be all that happy with our
military direction and decide to withold those parts. No, a Toyota airbag
would _not_ be as good...)


Why?

I just explained it. An uncertain supply line.


An airbag built in the US is an uncertain supply line? Gee, with
Detroit tetering on bankruptcy, it seems to me the military ought to
be sourcing its stuff from companies likely to exist **on their own
merits** in a few years.


.

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