Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Let Detroit Go Bankrupt

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 193 posts

Re: Let Detroit Go Bankrupt

#141

Post by thwarted »

antidaily wrote: post #139
Tichy wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why do they have a problem?

Financial wing GMAC got killed by subprime, the credit crunch, gas prices... all that on top of lagging sales. Sure, some of that perfect storm is their own fault. But, it's not as simple as "their cars suck" and "the workers make too much money".

If everyone pays for the things that are not their own fault, then the playing field is leveled. Then the things that are their own fault come into play, and those parties who were hit by the common problems AND their own problems will suffer more than those who didn't have their own problems (or had smaller self inflicted problems). Seems this is the way it should be.

Re: Let Detroit Go Bankrupt

#142

Post by fallentimes »

astine wrote: post #128
mchristoff wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it really disgusts me that this comment has been upmodded so much. it reeks of overgeneralization, ignorance, and hyperbole. it's very easy to sit on your high horse and talk about hypothetical denny's waitresses, but a little harder when this actually effects you and your loved ones. my father worked his ass off for GM for more than 25 years, not to mention driving 100 miles each way for the last 10 so his family di…

It really disgusts me that this comment has been upmodded so much. it reeks of overgeneralization, ignorance, and hyperbole. it's very easy to sit on your high horse and talk about hypothetical denny's waitresses, but a little harder when this actually effects you and your loved ones. Very true. The dangers many Americans face as a result of all this are real, as are the hardships that prompted folks to adopt these b…

American hardships are nothing compared to third world countries' hardships.

That's why I donate my money to the real poor (the people who don't know if they're going to be alive on a day to day basis) not the American poor.

Yeah lots of people have tough lives here, but they're still in the top 5% of the world's population.

Re: Let Detroit Go Bankrupt

#143

Post by blurry »

mchristoff wrote: post #81
crabapple wrote: post #11

one must ask why a waitress at denny's who makes minimum wage and has no healthcare must bail out union workers at gm who make 8x the wages, do less work, have ZERO DEDUCTABLE healthcare (do you? i doubt it), and full pensions. or why should a succesful worker at honda in ohio subsidize not only a failed competitor, but in essence have his own taxation used to undermine his own hard work? as for saving jobs and inves…

it really disgusts me that this comment has been upmodded so much. it reeks of overgeneralization, ignorance, and hyperbole. it's very easy to sit on your high horse and talk about hypothetical denny's waitresses, but a little harder when this actually effects you and your loved ones. my father worked his ass off for GM for more than 25 years, not to mention driving 100 miles each way for the last 10 so his family di…

You know what disgusts me? Your complete blindness to how good your father had it. As a not-so-recent immigrant to the US, I've found it laughably easy to have a good life here. I am not talking about myself since I came at 25 and spoke enough English to get by. I am talking older relatives and their friends, people well into their 50's who did not speak a word of English. There is an absolute wealth of opportunities - classes at community colleges that you can take for near free, paying jobs where you have plenty of time for studying while taking care of the elderly for example, charitable organizations that assist you in everything from relocation to getting jobs, government programs that give you bridge money to get you on your feet, and so on.

If you think your father had a rough life, you are truly a spoiled brat. My father almost starved to death as a teenager during World War II, almost died from tuberculosis as a young man, shared a small one-bedroom apartment with 5 people as an adult, and was forced to abandon even that little due to ethnic conflict. Your father on the other hand, had it so easy that he could afford to put his kids through college and still retire after just 25 years of work. Oh, excuse me, I forgot. Your dad had to endure a 2-3 hour commute because it would be so traumatizing for his kids to switch schools once.

Your father and his buddies are who needs to get off the high horse, my friend. They've worked in a little bubble with their cushy guaranteed pay and benefits for too long. It's about time they ventured out on their own into the big bad world that the rest of us happily inhabit.

Re: Let Detroit Go Bankrupt

#144

Post by vlad »

Retric wrote: post #130
adamc wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tax on $16k per year is miniscule, if any.

SS works out to ~15.3% add Medicare etc, and they are at ~20% the absolute top tax rate is 35% assuming zero deductions but capital gains is only 15%. With 16k * .2 we get 3,200$ in tax. Earned income tax credit = $428 with no qualifying children wow that helps.

An employee's share of SS tax is 6.4%, not 15.3%. (The full amount is twice that, or 12.4%, so I'm not sure where 15.3% comes from.) Add Medicare tax (1.45%, not 5%, and the employer pays a matching amount). You get 6.4% + 1.45% = 7.85%, not 20%. That's ~$1250. Add a 15% tax rate for a $2,000 federal tax, not 20%. We both arrive at $3,200 but I think my numbers are more accurate. Where you working backwards from a known number?

Re: Let Detroit Go Bankrupt

#145

Post by zach »

mdasen wrote: post #80
jmtulloss wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you site that $73/hour wage? A cursory glance around the internet indicated something around $30/hr as of last year. The only places I saw $73 were other forums, but maybe they all have a common, legit source.

I cannot say what the previous person was referencing, but NPR has a great comparison of GM and Toyota at http://www.npr.org/news/specials/gmvstoyota/ If you read the list, it looks like you're both (partially) correct. The average hourly salary for non-skilled assembly-line workers is a little over $31. However, GM's labor cost per hour exceeds $73/hour for those workers. So, in terms of GM's costs, it's over $73/ho…

Well, the reason employer-sponsored health care took off was that WWII wage controls were still around for years of the post-war economy. Growing employers, auto manufacturers in particular, could not offer higher wages to attract workers. So they offered employer-sponsored health programs and attractive pensions. In the 1970s, when Nixon brought back wage controls, they improved their low-deductible health care plans to no-deductible plans.

Here's the scenario. From its boom era, Detroit ended up saddled with lots of pensions, expensive health care, and a special interest which fights cutbacks fiercely. It was basically building up an deficit that, when combined with horrible mismanagement, sent it into tremendous debt and would hobble it when it hit bad economic times and lost access to the capital markets.

Does that scenario look familiar? That's about what's happening to the United States. Hey wait, did a presidential hopeful write this op-ed? Hmm.

Re: Let Detroit Go Bankrupt

#146

Post by Retric »

vlad wrote: post #144
Retric wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SS works out to ~15.3% add Medicare etc, and they are at ~20% the absolute top tax rate is 35% assuming zero deductions but capital gains is only 15%. With 16k * .2 we get 3,200$ in tax. Earned income tax credit = $428 with no qualifying children wow that helps.

An employee's share of SS tax is 6.4%, not 15.3%. (The full amount is twice that, or 12.4%, so I'm not sure where 15.3% comes from.) Add Medicare tax (1.45%, not 5%, and the employer pays a matching amount). You get 6.4% + 1.45% = 7.85%, not 20%. That's ~$1250. Add a 15% tax rate for a $2,000 federal tax, not 20%. We both arrive at $3,200 but I think my numbers are more accurate. Where you working backwards from a kn…

I was working back from ~20% which I had worked out before but I dropped an import etc so the numbers looked off. Anyway, we could argue about the numbers game, but self employed people pay the same effective rate so it's all BS IMO. You are correct about Medicare but wrong about SS.

For 2008, your employer withholds Social Security at the rate of 7.65% of your first $102,200 of income. For Medicare, the withholding rate is 1.45% of your income, regardless of how much you earn. (http://www.walletpop.com/taxes/article/_a/bbdp/withholding-y...)

7.65 * 2 = 15.3% but it's 15.3% of 100 not (100 + 7.65 + 1.45) = 109.1. Anyway, adding state income tax or it's equivalent's and the numbers start to go up but 20% seems like a reasonable number for federal.

If your income is low enough you do get government services which offset your cost of living, but your effective tax rate on you next dollar of earnings is still fairly high.

PS: I built a little Javascript calculator to work this out I should probably post this somewhere.

Re: Let Detroit Go Bankrupt

#147

Post by Retric »

Dilpil wrote: post #138
Retric wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think 3/4 of teachers, police, and the military simply show up and are waiting for retirement. They might not put in 110% as it where but they still get a lot of stuff done. I think it's the Government office workers that don't really do much but most private sector office workers don't seem to get much done so I wonder how much less effective they really are. (Cue XKCD comic "it's time for science" or some s…

3/4ths of teachers sounds about reasonable.

Yea, I was trying to show a trend. Plenty of teachers stopped caring a long time ago and there is also a lot of dead weight in the police and military but the less what they do is an "office job" the more effort they seem to put in. There is plenty of dead wood in the forest service, but smoke jumpers as a group put in a lot of hard work.

Re: Let Detroit Go Bankrupt

#148

Post by LPTS »

mnemonik wrote: post #101
LPTS wrote: post #100

Mitt Romney. I'm supposed to take anything this asshole says seriously? Why? Next up, Sarah Palin on Russian Policy, or Bill Kristol's bedwetting?

Sarah Palin doesn't know anything about foreign policy. Mitt Romney on the other hand is a successful businessman. This means he knows what he is talking about here.

Uhh...

No. Mitt Romney is a spineless, shifty fuck who failed at tricking enough republican morons into voting for him against their own economic interests. He has no principles (at all) and would happily say any thing to any audience if his pollsters said it would play. The game he was playing wasn't 'tell people what you think' but 'use 100 years of branding and mass psychology to trick people and you can have the power to do whatever you want regardless of what you said.' I'll say it again. Fuck Mitt Romney.

It's important to keep this in it's proper perspective. Mitt Romney is a successful businessman. So we should listen to what he says on the US economy. That's like saying my obsessive compulsive butcher (kill kill kill kill kill cut cut cut cut cut) is good with animals so I should let him watch my pets. Fuck Mitt Romney.

I'm disappointed by this thread. I thought the people here were smarter then this. When you listen to Mitt Romney, you are listening to a sociopathic bedwetter in magic underwear who will say anything to get power, and then feel like he can do whatever he wants with his power for winning the game of tricking the most idiots, and that anything he does that hurts people is OK because God wanted him to have power.

Re: Let Detroit Go Bankrupt

#149

Post by sethg »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #111
sethg wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The unemployment would cost the government more than the bailout. One could argue that it would still be better off in the long term for the government to bite the bullet and pay that unemployment money than to keep the US auto industry afloat; I am partial to that argument myself. But I'm responding to the "why should a waitress at Denny's..." question.

Unemployment costs $362/week + administrative overhead. The wage of an auto worker costs from $1200/week to $2920/week (depending on whether you believe the $30/hour number or the $73/hour number floating around). http://www.michigan.gov/documents/uia/EUC_Fact_Sheet_120_240... Additionally, auto workers have an incentive to get off unemployment; it pays less than market rate. They have no incentive to stop working fo…

If the auto companies get a bailout, then they can continue to sell cars (GM's revenue is on the order of $150B) and that revenue can be used to continue to pay the workers, the suppliers, etc.

If they go under, then all the money to support laid-off auto workers has to come from the government.

Re: Let Detroit Go Bankrupt

#150

Post by sethg »

ars wrote: post #86
mchristoff wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it really disgusts me that this comment has been upmodded so much. it reeks of overgeneralization, ignorance, and hyperbole. it's very easy to sit on your high horse and talk about hypothetical denny's waitresses, but a little harder when this actually effects you and your loved ones. my father worked his ass off for GM for more than 25 years, not to mention driving 100 miles each way for the last 10 so his family di…

You're talking like his job was an entitlement. Companies go bust and people lose jobs, it happens a lot. The reason people are talking UAW workers that way, is not because they begrudge the individual worker like your father - they don't. It's because the car companies were not allowed to fire or lay off people as they wished, which gives a very strong impression of entitlement and job guarantees amongst UAW workers…

Every contract has two sides, so I don't see why the UAW should be singled out for blame here. The management must have believed that their contract with the auto workers would still leave them enough cash to make a profit--otherwise they never would have signed the contract in the first place!
Post reply on HN