kirktastic

Well those days of temps in the 80s and mild mornings had to come to an end sometime. Yesterday was a gorgeously warm, sunny day then the winds came last night with colder temps. The weather people were saying it was going to get down to freezing outside of town. Presently it is 49f outside and I’m inside the coffeehouse rather than at a table outside.

The economy continues to suck. The $700 billion of your and my money doesn’t seem to doing much. The current thing going on in DC is whether we should bail out the domestic auto makers. Seems to me we’d just be throwing good money after bad — much like with what we’re doing on Wall Street. Some say letting GM go tits up would impact lots of jobs and really fuck up the economy. As I see the third Smart car of the day in the parking lot outside I wonder if it is worth saving. This is the same company that had a huge market share of the market in the 1970s and allowed Toyota and Honda to enter the market with more fuel efficient cars while GM kept making gas pigs. This is the same company that spent millions of dollars lobbying Congress not have strict fuel efficiency standards. This is the same company that in the spring of THIS YEAR realized that big trucks and SUVs were not the future of automobiles. The “buy American” and “we need an American car company” arguments don’t hold water with me. Most of the Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Hyundai, Mitsubishi and other “foreign” nameplates are made by Americans in the United States. Meanwhile a lot of the American cars from GM and Ford (or large parts of them) are made in Mexico and Canada. Volkswagen recently announced plans to spend a billion dollars building a plant in Kentucky. You see the “foreigners” investing more — and creating more jobs with health insurance benefits — but American brands move all their shit outside the US. The successful models the American companies have outside the US aren’t sold here. I remember being in an Opel (GM) and Ford cars in Europe and being surprised by their fit and finish and craftsmanship. The same rental cars I drive in the US seem like they’re going to fall apart.

Sure, there’s probably a market for shitty cars like the Crown Victoria used for cop cars and government vehicles. Perhaps that could be the saving grace: The US government — and state and local guys — commit to spend the tons of money they usually do on cars now. A caveat will be in a few years they have to be more fuel efficient and have hybrid technology. Investors should be happy that there’s a guaranteed revenue stream and the guys can keep their jobs and benefits. There would have to be big changes. The companies are too big. Lots of people would lose their jobs.

But no, what we’ll end up doing is giving them money and they’ll keep on with the only business they know. I wish those “free market” Republicans would be consistent and just these companies fail. What would result is a single US car company made up of just the parts that make sense (please tell me why you have a Chevy and Pontiac car that are identical and competing with each other rather than a single model that can compete with a real competitor like Toyota?). Yes, it will worsen an already sick economy but sometimes it is better to take the patient off of life support rather than have them kept alive in pain indefinitely.