should we give chrysler/gm us$25 billion of our money to save them from bankruptcy? no. here's why:
gm and chrysler's problems predate the current credit crunch by a considerable margin. in fact, they've been committing the cardinal sin of business for decades: building what they want to sell, rather than what customers want to buy (a culture common to a few of our past employers, too).
the difference is, when those employers reached their inevitable ends, the government wasn't waiting, cash in hand, to bail them out. instead, they were rewarded for their willful thickheadedness with a market society's greatest weapon and most terrible punishment: they went out of business. bought by rivals, consumed by shareholders, or dying a slow, cancerous death, they all eventually paid that price for their stupidity, and rightly so.
some will argue that the automakers must be bailed out because of the number of jobs at stake, but this is poor management. you don't reward a line worker that stays at a job where they are taught by their coworkers to do the minimum amount of work to avoid getting fired, setting their benefit and pay demands on 'stun', and ignoring that a worker at a chinese car company - with whom they will shortly compete - makes $6 a day and works 13 hours a day with zero days off.
if you think that chinese (or indian, or honduran, or costa rican, or or or) worker won't be competing with you for a job in a few years, months, or days, you're living in a dream: an economic downturn is an ideal hook for your company to hang further outsourcing on.
no. both sides - labor and management - are to blame. both sides should pay for their mistakes. we should cut our losses here, let the fallout fall, and invest in those companies and those market segments that actually have a prayer of surviving long term.
we don't know about you, but we're tired of dc pouring our futures down this particular long, black hole. and in case you think a win by one candidate or the other will change things much, recall that we still haven't heard obamee or mclame talk about punishment for those responsible for the global economic meltdown.