Chevy Volt a Failure - GM to Layoff 1,300

No. Because those jobs are EVIL!!!!

 

How can we defend ourselves if we cannot mass produce?

And I would think the brains behind the Hummer are a lot farther off the mark than the brains behind the Volt.

 

So you're telling me that you honestly think the WH decided to bail out GM had absolutely nothing to do with saving the jobs of millions of people who vote in overwhelming numbers for Democrats? Is that what you're saying?

Why, then, didn't the government intervene to preserve jobs for the millions of people who have lost theirs since 2008, including a bunch of journalists (like myself)? What makes those jobs so much less important that the federal government can just let them go away, but the GM employees just had to be saved?

 

Is there another industry where 1 million jobs could have been saved with one move like this?

 

Yes the technology industry and all it's outsourced jobs.

 

With one move, Boom? With one stroke of the pen?

 

You skipped a few steps between allowing a failing industry to fail and "we cannot mass produce."

We mass produce a metric shit-ton of stuff. Letting those companies fail wasn't going to change that.

 

Well, unfortunately for our board libertarians and the poor bondholders, I guess, a vast majority of people in the country were in agreement with the government's intervention in the auto industry, just as they were with the bailouts of Citi Bank, Bank of America, AIG, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, PNC, US Bancorp, etc.), and they are pleased with the results of these investments because they believed strongly enough that without them we would have faced a far worse economic crisis. I guess we'll just never know what would have happened without government intervention. I'm OK with that.

 

Not remotely a libertaria, but I'm okay with being out of step with most Americans' understanding of economics.

 

I dare you to find two Americans with the same understanding of economics. All I said was that there was a strong consensus across party lines for government intervention back in '08 and '09 while there was absolutely no appetite for the risk associated with allowing these companies to crumble. Board rooms full of our greatest free-market capitalists blinked in unison.

 

Oh my, this is too easy. I can prove to you that I can live up to your challenge just by asking a rhetorical question: What is the modal amount of "understanding of economics" among Americans?

 

To me bailing out GM was a no brainer. It was a situation where you had to put aside economic and financial logic. Symbolically we were not in a time where we could afford for GM to go down the drain. You can't underestimate the roll that confidence plays in our financial system.

Now The Volt is another matter. I don't think that the Administration should have forced GM to fast track the Volt to support their political initiatives.