61–70 of 74 posts
institute new federal efficiency standards on all cars sold in america. this will level the playing field while the american auto industry retools itself.
pump tens of billions of dollars into research and development to create the next wave of vehicles that meet these new standards.
No one will let GM die, especially not a Democrats controlled congress and a Democrat as president. They owe the unions for the votes and no one is brave enough to tell GM -- whom people have worked for multiple generations and who in turn have been taken care of by the company -- to go die. We'll just going to hand them money.
If nothing else it's a much better way of spending money than a war.
There is a middle ground between bailout and a liquidation - a bankruptcy reorganization. It would probably wipe out the shareholders and the debt holders, and some jobs and factories, but a lot of GM and its brands and factories would live on.
As stated elsewhere, the great danger is that a reorganization would fail due to tight credit markets. In a normal economic situation, a GM bankruptcy would be good news. The company could be held in trust, re-organize itself, and become profitable for (some) creditors. Right now, credit is tight, investors are skittish, and government resources are stretched. It's not that GM is too big to fail. It's that GM is too…
Maybe the problem is that GM is too big to succeed.
let them die, imo. keeping them on life support will just be a drain on everyone. bailing them out will just allow them to continue to be a terrible company. instead, use that money to fund grants and initiatives and prizes to incentivize new companies or GM itself, provided results are produced. that way, the industry will move forward. a bailout would almost definitely result in stagnation for many years. imo, ofc.…
If they just died we could move onto the next stage of creative destruction, and those car people would build cars using alternative fuels, electric cars, fuel effecient, cool looking cars (not buicks, SUVs, and La Sabres).
However, I think we have to consider that if America stopped making cars then we'd just be sitting ducks for all the other manufacturers out there that are doing fine. Toyota, Germany, the Chinese, and Koreans. I think they'd just dump cheap imports on us, and we wouldn't get an environment where entrepreneurs could innovate new products without competition from larger manufacturers.
So I think the die argument, even without considering the pain of job loss, is naive to think we'd get better products made by American companies. I'm not convinced we would be better off letting them die.
let them die, imo. keeping them on life support will just be a drain on everyone. bailing them out will just allow them to continue to be a terrible company. instead, use that money to fund grants and initiatives and prizes to incentivize new companies or GM itself, provided results are produced. that way, the industry will move forward. a bailout would almost definitely result in stagnation for many years. imo, ofc.…
In theory I'd say die die and die some more. I'd like to think that if we let GM just die then out of work car people will move on to creating the cars we actually want/need. Rather than arguing with unions over health care and labor standards, and begging for hand outs. If they just died we could move onto the next stage of creative destruction, and those car people would build cars using alternative fuels, electric…
As a founder of an auto(motive) startup, let me tell you that the things we'd do with x billion at this stage are not good. Some investment would be helpful (and we're looking for it), but a government administered venture fund of those proportions would probably be a disaster; a distraction for the ages. Our contention is that the market has not yet fund the successor technology to gasoline yet, and giving existing…
Is it really that GM has failed to innovate? Let's look at the numbers: GM======================================Toyota $1,525 in healthcare per vehicle $201 in healcare per vehicle $73.73 avg cost of a labor hour $48 avg cost of a labor hour 34.3 hours to build a vehicle 27.9 hours to build a vehicle Loses $2,331 per vehicle Makes $1,488 per vehicle So, let's just alter GM's healthcare and labor costs to Toyota's lev…
The only way to cut GM's health care costs are to cut loose the 406,000 retirees--and their dependents--who get health care via GM pension plans. Of course I find it interesting that if I can't make the mortgage due to circumstances I didn't predict, too bad. I can't even discharge that during personal bankruptcy anymore, it's pay the whole freight or get out. GM entered a set of contractual obligations, didn't predi…
My dad is a retired GM employee (33 years), and I can tell you that his base pay was about $28/hr at the end. Granted, the cost of benefits were so high that they were scared to hire too many people, so he got tons of overtime.
In fact, he averaged over 60 hours a week (and often up to 85) the last 7 years he was there (1998-2005), so his annual pay looked pretty darn good with all that time-and-a-half. He accepted a buyout to retire, even though he wasn't really ready to, and as he was leaving they already had most of the plant converted to $14/hr non-union positions.
The days of the platinum health-care for retirees are pretty much over as well. My mom just spent a week at home sick because she didn't want to spend $175 to go to the doctor. When I was growing up we could go to the doctor/hospital for free on Dad's insurance, so this was a bit of a shock to me. Sadly it seems like my $55/mo high deductible plan beats their insurance in a lot of ways.
I'm not saying all this to try and earn sympathy for my parents or blame GM. I just want to point out that it's not all roses for the 'greedy union workers and retirees' either. There has been a lot of absurd crap over the years (like the job banks that paid people to sit in a room all day), but the absurdity goes both ways. My dad has stories about them building cars that had no buyers, just to honor supplier agreements, and then storing said cars in fields until they were scrapped.