Originally Posted by
BengeBoy
For that matter, if they're going to use taxpayer money to support the companies, do the taxpayers get a say in what kind of cars are made. Do we need cars that produce over 200 horsepower or go 0 to 60 in less than 8.0 seconds? Do we need sunroofs? Should people with bad driving records be able to take out an 84-month car loan for a high performance sports car, or should they be forced to buy cheaper, used, beater cars until they clean up their records? Is the engineering talent at GM really focused on an energy efficient car of the future or how to squeeze yet another cup holder into the next generation of minivans?
The american taxpayer has been dictating the cars to build all along. This may not jive with your personal aesthetic, but the reason the car companies all built huge trucks and fast sports cars through the past fifteen years was because these are the vehicles people wanted to buy. Those buyers were these same 'taxpayers' that you now think wanted something else.
I think if it's a slippery slope - if the industry wants public money to stay alive because having them alive is a public good than the taxpayers should force them only to build "good cars," and then sit back and watch while we figure out no one can agree what "good" is.
This assumes that a bailout means that congress needs to start deciding on product development. It makes no sense.
How about this. Realize that the big three have been competing for the past 40 years with car companies that are nurtured and protected by their governments in their own markets. Realize that we have even built a two-tiered structure in our own country for manufacturing by sustaining old rules in the states where the big three are strong while other states where the transplants set up are right-to-work and much more lax on work rules. Maybe it's a testament to the big three to have survived so long with one hand tied behind their back.
In the end, seems to me that the market makes better decisions on what kind of companies should survive than governments do.
Maybe. But once we cannot make our own steel, cars, airplanes, trucks, mining equipment, ships, construction equipment and weapons systems then we won't really be an industrialized nation anymore. What are we going to do? Sew swooshes onto Nikes for $1 a day for Chinese and Indian consumers?