Auto Bailouts?

Bailout for the auto industry? Nope. Won't do it- won't support it. I wasn't wild about the first one and that's turning into fun and games. And I'm tired of socialism for corporations and rich people while the rest of us go hang. It's not that I'm unsympathetic to the idea of all those people (and there are a lot) losing their jobs just in time for Christmas- it's just that I think a bailout delays the inevitable more than anything else.

People say: it's the Unions. Well, that could be true- but it's not the whole problem. Yes, the big 3 pay about $73 per worker per car as a posed to about $48 from other companies, so there's a disparity- (those are the numbers I have seen) but if your product sucks, then you can cut union benefits to a dollar and it won't make the difference in the situation.

We bailed out the airlines after 9-11 and now prices are going up, smaller airlines are going bankrupt and bigger ones are consolidating. Let the Big 3 drop- and if we're going to pony up $25 billion, let's use it to put those soon to be unemployed autoworkers back to work doing something. Whether it's job retraining or infrastructure projects. I'd much rather the money go to that than to companies everyone is pretty much sure are going to go under anyway.

I don't know. It's hard to be totally indifferent to all of those jobs potentially lost and the people that have them, but these struggles in the auto industry have been going on for quite some time and they don't seem to be willing to change all that much. Other major industries (as David Brooks pointed out in his column) have gone through bankruptcy and adjusted. Perhaps the auto industry should as well- but again, I find myself hampered by my lack of knowledge about the field of economics, so it's hard to say what's right and what's the best thing to do.