Re: OT. Grab your wallets, here come the Dems

On Nov 7, 9:06 am, "tomor...@xxxxxxxxx"
<tomorrowerolsdot...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Nov 7, 11:45 am, Rob Kleinschmidt <Rkleinsch1216...@xxxxxxx> wrote:



On Nov 7, 6:16 am, "tomor...@xxxxxxxxx"

<tomorrowerolsdot...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Nov 6, 10:52 pm, Rob Kleinschmidt <Rkleinsch1216...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Figure those golden parachutes put a lot of
money in your pocket ? Figure they were
honestly earned and well deserved ?

Some were, some weren't. Shrug. None of our business (unless we
owned the stock and attended he board meetings and cast out ballots on
executive pay) until our elected officials decided to bail out the big
banks and insurance companies.

And then there's GM.

Locked in parachutes, locked in pensions, burn rate
says they don't make it through 2009. Spent the
last decade building gas guzzlers in the face of a
looming energy crunch. Wotta company.

They built what consumers wanted during an era of cheap fuel. They
build tiny, fuel efficient cars for markets that demand such because
of governmental tax policies that artificially inflate the price of
fuel. In fact, GM does MUCH better, financially, building and selling
those small cars in Europe than they do (and did) selling SUVs and
pick-up trucks to Americans.

I'm fine with that except for the idea of bailout worthiness
after making all of the above decisions. It's a little odd to
want unfettered capitalism in the good times and bailouts
in the bad.

Maybe the loss of the U.S. steel industry wasn't
instructive enough for America's blue collar middle class voters.
perhaps it will take the loss of the entire domestic auto industry and
the industries that supply it, support it, and depend on it, to get
the message through that we can't all get rich selling each other
Indonesian leather jackets, Japanese cars and motorcycles, and Chinese
electronics.

My brief career as a steelworker long ago tells me this isn't what
I'd want for my kids. Competing head to head with unskilled and
semi-skilled labor in India, China and Pakistan doesn't look too
promising.

It bothers me a lot that we let the electronics industry get away.
It bothers me even more that we're letting the engineering and
R&D leave the country.

We did really well at manufacturing sixty years ago when most
of the rest of the world had been bombed flat during WWII.
Right now, it seems like the smartest move we could be making
would be funding better education to upgrade our skill sets.

.

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