I have an idea. Instead of a bailout, let's give the Big 3 Detroit automakers a clue. It won't cost anything and it might be more useful in the long run.
The big quandry these days is whether we should give GM, Ford and Chrysler $25 billion to tide them over until... until what? Until they start making cars people actually want to buy? Until they stop paying people ludicrously high salaries to screw door handles on trucks? What do they think is going to change six months from now? They're not going to suddenly become viable companies with a good business plan and stellar products.
$25 billion doesn't sound like a lot considering Congress just voted to give financial institutions $700 billion. But the banks know what they did wrong, and I seriously doubt they're going to be writing a lot of subprime mortgages now to people who can't pay them back. Letting a few banks go under may not be a tragedy, but letting a lot of them go under would have been. So what will happen if the Big 3 suddenly become the Big 2? Yes, there will be jobs lost, but there will be anyway. Nobody seriously thinks all three of these companies will go under, particularly Ford, which seems to be in a much better position than GM or Chrysler.
Chrysler is already owned by a private equity firm. GM has been horribly mismanaged for decades. If one of these companies goes belly up, it may give Ford enough new business that they could hold on through this economic slowdown without any help. But Ford would need to get its act together as well -- why, for instance, is there a Mercury brand? Like GM, who needs to jettison Pontiac, Buick and Saturn, I can't figure out why they haven't ditched all these different name plates and their individual management groups a long time ago. These automakers will have to streamline no matter what; it would make sense to me to get rid of these redundant brands which just don't make good business sense and never did.
In the interest of full disclosure, I used to buy nothing but GM cars. My now ex-husband also had Ford trucks. Then one day I went to look at the new models and was so disgusted by them that I took off for the nearest Honda dealership. I have never looked back, and that was 20 years ago. They lost my business like they lost a lot of other people's business through poor design and worse reliability.
In this age it's entirely possible to buy an American-made Toyota that has a larger percentage of parts made in the U.S. than your neighbor's Chevy, which was made in Mexico with an engine from Japan. If you want to be patriotic and "buy American," there is no longer a clear definition of what that means in the auto industry. BMW is expanding its plant in South Carolina; VW is looking at building a plant here because labor is actually cheaper here than in Germany. There will be jobs for auto workers, the only question is what companies can make cars that are reliable and that people want to buy?
The Big 3 need to learn another lesson -- they made a lot of money for many years from the explosion in SUV and truck sales, all the while paying hundreds of millions of dollars to lobbyists to keep Congress from legislating higher fuel mileage standards and bypassing the ones that did exist by getting them to exclude SUVs from the mix. Now the consumer is also to blame here, as they bought these monster SUVs and trucks and said "I don't give a damn" to the environment (while conveniently forgetting that our dependence on foreign oil is also a national security issue). It's now time for Detroit to own up to their own sins and create some fuel-efficient, reliable, well-designed cars. Maybe then we'll have American automobile manufacturers to be proud of.
