Why only $25 Billion for the auto-makers? Why not $30 Billion more? That would be about billion per year for each year since the first energy crisis on top of the previous loan “guarantees.”
Does the reader realize that at least some of those GM and Ford’s retirees hadn’t begun to work for the “Big Three” when the foreign manufacturers started their rise: not their dominance, but their RISE engineering and marketing supremacy.
Umm, couldn’t we taxpayers start a new, efficient car company for a lot less–even a “green” one? So, exactly who or what are we subsidizing? Oh, inefficient management and intransigent unions that did not have the discipline to change in over thirty years!
Thirty years! Through X-cars and J-cars and Jaguar and Saab and Saturn and Lee Iaccoca and bail-outs and tax-breaks and robots and every other ill-conceived venture that permitted bad cost accountants to rule good engineers and management to avoid managing its biggest cost. Shame on them all.
Did none of those parties ever visit Pittsburgh or Cleveland or Buffalo any time after 1980 to see what the same combination ineptitude and greed did to the domestic steel industry?
Nowadays, they call the enormous, empty lots along the rivers ”brownfields.” Growing up, we never realized the Pittsburgh had flood plains until the mills were all gone and with them about 600,000 people.
For you professional football fans, those members of the local diaspora are the ones you see flooding the stadiums at all of the Steelers’ away games. (Some of the duller announcers may be amazed that it is not a traveling caravan of yinzers–like dead-heads–who travel from city-to-city from game-to-game. The airlines only wish.)
