we need a manufacturing and export based strategy in our country. And don't bring up hoover unless you can explain how building up industries which do not currently exist would be bad for our economy.
There's THE typical liberal response: any disagreement with their vacuus arguments is attributed to nefarious motives or stupidity. ...So, Z, why do YOU hate America and Americans? The auto industry unions is just another group that wants its cake and eat it too. They demand both high share of the auto market, to which they think they are entitled, AND higher wages than other American workers (eg, those that built my Toyota) because they contribute lots of money and votes to the Dems. It's their time, they think, to collect (my money.) I don't want that. Imo, any loans by the Government should be met with drastic steps towards wages/benefits parity with their competition, not to mention designing and producing a better car.
Why don't you have a sense of humor? Oh sorry, I forgot, you're a liberal PC monitor. No sense of humor allowed. Anyway, why should taxpayers, the vast majority of whom are non-union, be forced to subsidize lavish union pay scales? If these companies paid their workers what the import manufacturers pay their US workers, they could afford to give their CEOs bigger comp packages and buy more corporate jets.
You guys with your name calling crack me up sometimes. I really think that you just like the idea of yanking a very easily pullable chain from your counterpart, right or left. Blanket statements like the ops are ridiculous from the outset. Talk show host nonsense, yes from both sides, to keep the otherwise un-employable loudmouths in their mansions. Shock jock, grade school level finger pointing. For a better analysis of fundamental breakdowns that we've seen over the decades, try something like this: Human Behaviors Encountered During the Different Phases of the Kondratieff Cycle Introduction Borrowing images from biology to fit the marketplace is not new. Companies and organizations resemble living organisms. They are born; mature; get married; have daughters; become aggressive, sleepy, or exhausted; grow old; and eventually die or become prey to a voracious predator. As early as the turn of the century, enlightened economists and broad-minded physicists applied scientific notions such as periodic harmonic motion and Darwinâs survival of the fittest to human products. In 1918 Lotka successfully predicted the size of the American railway network, via mathematical formulations from biology.[1] At about the same time (1926), the Russian economist Nikolai D. Kondratieff was establishing evidence for a long economic wave with a period of 50 to 60 years. This claim scored high points in popularity when the stock market crashed in 1987 and continued to score high with the persisting depressionlike economy that, as had happened 58 years earlier, followed the 1987 crash. Full article: http://www.growth-dynamics.com/articles/Theodore Modis_Revised.htm This may or may not float your boat, but at least it helps define the generational impact of human behavior on the markets. The latest generation has over leveraged and feels entitled to everything. I'm not say that in a blanket statement, but when the overwheliming percentage of a whole generation feel entitled, it hurts everyone. GM and Ford making crappier cars is a problem. Trade imbalance is a problem. Getting our Government to intevene, socialist style, is a problem, banks loaning money to those who don't qualify is a problem, and yes, unions holding onto too big a piece of the pie is a problem, CEO excessive pay and golden parachutes are problems, over-leverage from hedge funds are problems, un-regulated derivative trading is a problem, I could go on. So, we have plenty of problems. Finger pointing and name calling to ideological adversaries IS NOT FINDING A SOLUTON. c
Not that I disagree with the essence of what you are saying, or want to point a finger at an adversary, or call you names like "liberal", etc, etc, but, I think, what we all need in this country is to START SPELLING BETTER!
Cgroupman i appreciate your analysis of market pyschology and also your awareness of the specific problems affecting the country. You stated the problems and than said that no finger pointing should be allowed, we should just find a solution. I again appreciate your acknowledgment of the problems. The final thing you said in your response was to find a solution. Well i could not agree more. You may not notice this but you are trashing a thread that is debating the solution to bankrupt auto makers and Unions. Think of it this way. A company is completely failing and they are about to go brankrupt. By this point it would be fair to say that the executives need to go back to the drawing board because they need to find immediate solutions that relate to the overall functioning of their company. Finding solutions means entirely erasing the factors that cause the problem in the first place. There may be a number of factors such as how much CEO's get paid and how much unions are affecting the business. The list of factors goes on and on. BUT! The most imporant aspect to understand when finding out the solution is understanding the dergee's of importance about every factor. What i mean by this is that these negative factors such as unions and executive pay need to be put on a scale of negativity. On a scale of 1 through 10 a 1 would be hardly negatively impacting the company at all and a 10 meaning that if this factor continues the company will be bankrupt. It is all about dissecting and looking at what needs to be done, not philosophizing the nature that everything is screwed up and everything needs fixing. By only superficially philosophizing you never actually guage which factors need to be fixed and therefore you never understand the truth of the matter and you never understand who is really to blame. It would be extremely fair to say that Unions are much higher up on the list of negativity than executive pay when it comes to factors hurting businesses and yet there is one party that is pro union and against freedom of executive pay while there is one party against strong unions that is willing to let companies pay their executives as much as they want or can. Bottom line is that Unions negatively impact companies more than high executive pay does. Liberals think that high executive pay hurts companies more than unions. The liberals are wrong. The day a liberal thinks in terms of right and wrong and winner and loser is the day he is not a liberal anymore.
I'm hardly a liberal, and excessive executive pay infuriates me. It is greed, nothing else. I know plenty of you swallow the nonsense about "incentivizing" CEOs and the necessity to get the best people and what the market says is appropriate, etc. Bottom line is most of these guys are unemployable elsewhere unless they take a 90% pay cut. Would Home Depot really be that much worse off if they had lost Nardelli to someone else who would meet his ridiculous demands? I could go on for pages. The other problem with excessive executive pay for a manufacturing company, or any company employing a lot of blue collar workers, is the effect on morale. Guys busting their butts all day in physically demanding work and then read that their candy ass CEO makes 3 or 400 times what they do, plus has the compnay air fleet at his disposal, the corporate retreats, the ski trips, the golf outings, etc. It's poor leadership for a CEO to take a comp package that negatively effects the workforce. No one expects a CEO to work for the same wage as an assembly line drone, but how can you expect anything but poor labor relations with the packages these clowns get?