The airline industry did not stop flying when it went bankrupt and the auto companies will not stop producing cars if they go bankrupt. In fact, bankruptcies will eliminate the debt on the books decrease interest payments and make the companies more competitive, if and when they ever get around to producing autos that consumers want instead of what the manufactures want to produce.
I hate the partisan crap that Harper pushed in a time like this, but I have to back the Conservatives in this fight since the opposition collation is promising to waste billions on bailouts.
Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses.
But ultimately, whether GM is dead or alive, the taxpayers are on the hook for billions, for everything from lost tax revenues to higher unemployment costs to taking over GM's pension obligations. The decision that Washington has to make is whether we pay for GM's survival or for its funeral.
Time provides an overview of what happens if GM is allowed to fail.
They were interviewing Bob Nardelli, the C.E.O. of Chrysler, and he was explaining why the auto industry, at that time, needed $25 billion in loan guarantees. It wasn’t a bailout, he said. It was a way to enable the car companies to retool for innovation. I could not help but shout back at the TV screen: “We have to subsidize Detroit so that it will innovate?”
The rest of America will be taking pay cuts, losing jobs, giving discounts to customers, etc. What is special about G.M. that they should be able to live as though 2008 never happened?
“Past Performance is No Indication of Future Results”. Its a statement attached to every financial salespitch ever offered. So why is it no one believes it ?
More than 150 prominent U.S. economists, including three Nobel Prize winners, urged Congress to hold off on passing a $700 billion financial market rescue plan until it can be studied more closely.
Including this interesting opinion:
``I suspect that part of what we're seeing in the freezing up of lending markets is strategic behavior on the part of big financial players who stand to benefit from the bailout,'' said David K. Levine, an economist at Washington University in St. Louis, who studies liquidity constraints and game theory.
On the subject of executive compensation, if they need government bailout money, take away 100pct of exit pay and any bonuses. Let them quit if need be.
I am afraid that policymakers today have not learned the lesson that prices must adjust to economic reality. The bailout of Fannie and Freddie, the purchase of AIG, and the latest multi-hundred billion dollar Treasury scheme all have one thing in common: They seek to prevent the liquidation of bad debt and worthless assets at market prices, and instead try to prop up those markets and keep those assets trading at prices far in excess of what any buyer would be willing to pay.
For years now, they’ve told us that we can’t afford—that the government providing healthcare to all people is just unimaginable; it can’t be done. We don’t have the money to rebuild our infrastructure. We don’t have the money to wipe out poverty. We can’t do it. But all of a sudden, yeah, we do have $700 billion for a bailout of Wall Street.
The government/quasi-government body most responsible for creating this mess (the Fed), will attempt a big power grab, purportedly to fix whatever problems it creates. The bigger the mess it creates, the more power it will attempt to grab.
But it's not just warnings and I-told-you-so, he presents alternative ideas.
Reduce the capital gains tax by 50% for any investor willing to cash out stocks and invest in 5 year bank CDs. Eliminate the difference between long term and short term capital gains. Eliminate taxable interest on savings accounts, CDs, and US treasuries.
It is no secret that infrastructure in the US is decaying and needs to be fixed. A collapsing bridge in Minnesota is one key example. And what out our aging energy grid? Instead of giving $700 billion to banks that deserve to go under, I would rather give half that for jobs programs.
Every year we gaze enviously at the lists of the richest people in world. Wondering what it would be like to have that sort of cash. But where would you sit on one of those lists? Here's your chance to find out.
He offered sample glasses of two red wines - one costing five cents per bottle and the other ten cents. The buyer tasted both and pronounced, “I’ll take the ten-cent one.” The wine in the two glasses was exactly the same.
I'm almost ready to admit in public that I can't taste the value of $400 bottle of Opus One compared to some other excellent Napa cabs that aren't even a tenth the price.
The main point of this video is is that corporations make lousy cooks. I liked it and I hope you watch the whole thing including the Q&A at the end. The presentation starts out with a rebuttal of the food science industry, which I think is a little oversimplified, but becomes an argument against corporate food and a commentary on social values and the economy.
My notes:
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants
Don't anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food
Shop the perimeter of the grocery store, it's the food that is least fiddled with.
Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot.
Don't food with more than 5 ingredients.
Don't eat food with ingredients you can't pronounce.
Don't eat food with high fructose corn syrup because it's a marker of highly processed food.
Get out of the supermarket and go to farmer's market.
Eat slower.
Eat until you're 80% full.
Don't eat alone.
Don't get your food where your car does.
Eat for pleasure and community and health will follow.
This costs money and time. At least 20% more expensive. Related to that, the real cost of a 99 cent hamburger has been externalized to the environment and health system.
The government has fixed the system in favor of processed food through things like corn & soy crop subsidies.
It's hard to make money selling simple things.
Those of us who can afford to vote with our forks should. Spend more eat less.
Social values are important. "I'm a good guest, I eat what's put in front of me." Don't eliminate special occasion food.
...normalizing obesity and diabetes, making the seats in the airplanes bigger, putting dialysis centers on the street corners in our inner cities next to the check cashing shops, becoming the Lipitor nation, I mean that's where we're going [...] or we can just change the way we eat.
I think this compliments John Berardi's 7 Habits of Highly
Effective Nutritional Programs, which is the basis for my current eating goals. Fundamentally Pollan, Berardi, and my personal trainer all agree that less processed is better and plants are good.
