Wednesday, June 3, 2009

OAF - Obama's Auto Follies; he won't be able to talk his way out of this one.

****Perhaps. Even when the key metric is not words but reality, he only has to fool 50+% of the people at any one time.Both FDR and JFK lied to the people about their health and morals and had their contemporaneous reputations far exceed their value and accomplishments ( except that FDR was a great war-time President and was admired by Churchill.)****
http://tinyurl.com/posdqo
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.
...Mr. Obama faces not a collapse of the domestic auto industry, but collapse of two companies miserable enough to have been extant in the 1930s when the Wagner Act was foisted upon the industry. We have a second auto industry, founded after the political and legal system had thought better of mandatory unionization, born of foreign parents, mostly in the South. It's surviving the recession without extraordinary help....fortitude is exactly what's missing today, as it was missing from Mr. Obama's statement on Monday, which attributed GM's failure to sins by everyone but Washington...waiting for the brave, original thinking that we were told Mr. Obama represented. ...he has landed for once in a situation where something more than symbolism is required of him...finally glided into the land of the real, where the key measurable outcome is no longer whether an audience is glowing with self-approval when he leaves the room. To wit, will GM become self-sustaining and profitable, as he promises, or a bottomless drain for taxpayer subsidies?...Nothing really will be solved, even by GM's bankruptcy, until Washington recognizes its own policy incoherence -- namely the impossibility of reconciling stiff fuel mileage mandates with gasoline prices set by the market, with a domestic labor monopoly, with a high degree of openness to international trade. (You can have three, but not four.)
...CAFE has done nothing to reduce gasoline usage or oil imports (car owners just end up driving more miles)...only causes U.S. manufacturers to make small cars and dump them at a loss on the public, subsidized with the profits of pickups and SUVs.Detroit doesn't have to match the transplants in wages and benefits, but CAFE distorted what would have been the Big Three's natural path of adaptation...would have focused on market segments where it could compete profitably even with its higher labor cost -- on bigger, pricier vehicles where labor cost is a lower share of value added.Unfortunately, Mr. Obama,...took to the CAFE fraud like a bat to a belfry. ...The "change" candidate who might have broken with a generation of political cant about CAFE instead appropriated the fraud for his own careerist purposes.... a fatal contradiction as he pours tens of billions of taxpayer dollars into the failed business model that CAFE foisted on Detroit.

No comments:

Post a Comment