How do you think Japan will like that?

The West has lost its technical advantage. China and India are no longer industrially backward nations. They both have first world research and development abilities and have become players in a world of technical over capacity. The dream of the U.S. producing the only 21 century quality auto is admitted to be a fantasy by auto engineers. The best the U.S. can do is to be competitive in a world that shares its industrial know how.

Consumer demand drives 75 percent of the American economy. We have been on a wild spending spree led by easy credit. Unfortunately the party is over and suppliers of the party goods are now going broke. Unless consumer demand is met in a more responsible way the U.S. will go into a deep depression. Trillions of government stimulation dollars can only give a jolt to an old man that has seen better days.

I would vote to kill that meme. How about if people only bought things they absolutely need to live. In a real economy of intelligent people marketing and sales jobs that add absolutely no value to the product don’t exist. Marketing and sales is a big part of what got us into this mess…..marketing and sales based consumption is anti-humanity. We can’t afford it anymore.

What wonderful logic. Since UAW makes 1.7 times average worker laying them off is worse then laying off an average paid worker.
Then definitely we should keep high prices CEOs.

Unless the UAW pay is scaled down to Toyota/Honda scale big3 can’t compete.
Giving into UAW demands will come back to haunt Obama like Clinton and gays in the military. Big mistake

But if something good comes of this, maybe it will be the demise of that ridiculous business model.

There’s the retail price that no one pays, the invoice price which is clearly bogus since so many people pay below “invoice”. Then there is the price you are offered which seems partly due to the alignment of the planets. Five people can go in and get five different prices.

Everyone feels they’re getting ripped off.

We almost bought a new car a few months ago. We had the cash.

But it then they start on with the bullshit and I couldn’t take it. We walked out the door.

Assume the bailout gets passed (today, tomorrow, Jan 21, whenever), what happens to the money?

Do they set loan it to buyers (that don’t exist)?

Do they pay factory workers to do nothing?

Do they give employees a bunch of the money force them to buy a new car they’ve made?

Do they prop up dealerships…for them to sit around / twiddle thumbs / tell dirty jokes?

http://www.newsobserver.com/business/story/1325398.html

Car dealerships often are kept in families for generations, and sponsor all sorts of social programs in their towns. Each one that disappears is a blow to that social fabric, and has to either be made up by another business, government money, or not funded at all.

Mid-priced restaurants are even being affected where I live now. The construction workers aren’t as numerous, and the high-end office workers are cutting back even more in anticipation of layoffs.

As for the infrastructure stimulus package, I’m in the road industry and we’ve been told the money will be earmarked for projects that can be put to work quickly. That would be things like resurfacing, safety, intersection improvement projects, maybe larger projects if they are “ready to go” and were shelved for lack of funding.

If a project will take a year or more to go to construction, it won’t be eligible. That right there would eliminate most major projects but a lot of bridge replacement projects might get funded quickly.

The best case scenario to me is that we gradually have cuts in pay implemented with small amounts of job losses and the UAW do the right thing for their workers and don’t stand in the way. A lot of benefits are going to be lost as well, but I think that is something that will happen across the American workforce for any industry that has to compete with foreign competition. It’s a kind of arbitrage of sorts.

For those people that think America doesn’t need this type of work in our society and we can just buy cars or other manufactured items made in India or China or that we as one poster suggested just fire a couple million people and it’s no big deal, where do you seriously think people are going to get work at then? Healthcare? Bullsh*t. (and they’ve already started outsourcing the medical analysis and records part of that) Service? Yes, that’s the goal of every 10-year-old making A’s in school in the 5th grade, get a job that pays $5 an hour at JC Penney or Starbucks or tourism shop. Education? If there’s less places for someone to get a job that requires critical thinking, there’s less reason to have a grandiose education system.

I’m not saying a guy on the Silverado line should make $50 an hour, but every person at the end of the day looks out for their own self-interest, and if we come to a work system where 15-20% of the population have the good jobs that prescribes them to elite status ad infinitum and the rest of us are either unemployed or toil in jobs where we’ll never make it above lower middle-class relative to now because we can’t raise wages past a certain point due to foreign competition, it’d lead to the workforce becoming static and not upwardly mobile. That’s not a very good system for a socially successful country to have. There are maybe 175-200 millionish Americans in this country of able body and working age, and for a country to be socially successful, you probably need 96% of them at a minimum to have jobs.

I don’t know the answer to this question, but I’ve yet to hear anyone have a satisfactory answer either.