United Liberty

Great article.

“In this free nation we do not choose to be ruled, we elect to be governed.”
— Barry Goldwater

Wait a minute. I initially heard that the auto bailout would be $15 billion, not $100 billion. What the hell?

“Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.” - Thomas Jefferson

I propose a bailout of all US Citizens who will be short on cash when our taxes go up. funny though when that happens we will have less cash to buy cars…hmmm does that mean we will just keep paying them forever? not to mention the fact after we do buy their crappy cars always with recalls they wont admit to without a huge issue, or repairs under warranty they wont cover we are stuck supporting them anyway because we have to buy yet another crappy car and hope it works better than the last one. hmmm makes you wonder. what does the government get for the bailout? oh yeah more of our cash. why wouldnt they vote for it???

why is it okay to bail out the banks? who can buy a car now in this country due to tight credit, a high unemployment rate, and foreclosures? what is wrong with you? Even if people want it they can’t buy it…

on the downside, thousands of families will be out of jobs, more homes will go under foreclosure, and the government will be faced with bailing out banks again? either way it isnt good news for anyone in the US. and it all started with the government allowing gas prices to go out of control and shipping jobs overseas in the first place. what do we do now for cars if our car companies go under? ship those jobs overseas too? we will not have any jobs left here. someone needs to come up with a plan. starting with eliminating the bogus interest rates that need to have limits or caps on loans, bogus fees such as hazard payments on mortgage loans, and getting lower health care for families to afford, as well as better options for college costs and repayment of student loans which if like anyone else interest doubles or triples the loan causing it to never get repaid, just like cars and homes, credit cards etc leading us all into bankruptcy. we also need to look at incomes for high paying positions that are above 100k a year in banks and large companies that are unneccessary, no one needs to make that much money which drives the cost of production and bank services way up in the first place. Government officials also do not need to make more than that either. Cost of everything kept going up, houses, paychecks, production, gas, loans, it was bound to have a breaking limit somewhere, looks like we have hit it.

From what I understand the unions won’t lower their wages to the same levej as Toyota , Hondo and other auto manufacturers in this country. I am a painting contractor who made $30 per man hour 3 years ago but I have had to lower that to $18 just to get work. I am not happy with that but thats life. It is better than starving.Let them go bust and lose their jobs if they dont lower their wages.

I am in the UAW and would have to say that what is not being mentioned or pondered is the fact that with the 2007 national agreement wages and benefits were brought in line with all the other automakers. It was just going to take a year or so to take affect. In the meantime the economy has tanked. The auto industry did not cause this situation, nor did the UAW. The situation that caused the need for a loan does not lie with the auto industry but moreso with the banking industry. They loaned millions if not billions to people that could not afford to pay it back. Then the gov’t wrote a 700 billion+ check to help them out. Then the money they got was not used to help people or other industries were used erroneously. Now an industry that employs over 240,000 with links to 2.5 million jobs are being denied a loan to weather a very difficult time. Can you imagine the magnitude of the blunder it would be to lose the tax revenue these jobs provide? States are paying thousands of dollars just to add 1 job to their state. They do this by providing tax breaks to companies (ie. toyota in the south) It would be crazy to give this industry away on many levels. But what this is really about is a political backlash for electing a Democrat.

My thoughts on the $700,000,000,000.00 bail out. I emailed these thoughts to my senators and just about anyone who I thought could use some input. I am very much against the bail out. We need to keep in mind that the greed of our financial whiz kids should have been checked by the members of congress and of course it wasn’t. Almost all of your representatives have been bought. Period.
I read a report that Bush had tried over a dozen times while he was in office(wish I could find that report again) to do something about what he knew would be a problem. Every time his efforts were shot down by our senators. McCain and others also tried, their efforts failed and the bail out has already been badly abused(not to mention pork) and has a long list of people with their hands out.
Anyhow, these are the thoughts that I had. Remember, I did not agree with a bail out but if they insisted on one, there was a really effective way to do it.

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The $700 billion is money that is being forcibly taken from the taxpayers of America, why not return it to them instead of the financial wizards out there who have clearly proven they can’t handle the job. Divide the money equally among all qualified taxpayers who made less than a half million dollars with just a few strings attached.

The strings…………
1. The money goes into the bank of your choice and you get a “gift card” to keep track of what is spent and on what.
2. You have to spend all of the money on anything you like. Your mortgage, any and all bills, vacations, tuition- anything legal.
3. You have to spend all the money in 18 months. After that the bank returns whatever is left in the bank account. This money is not to be considered as income for the normal annual taxes.

Here is where it really boggles the mind……..
The money you forcibly took from the taxpayers? Hopefully, at a reduced rate, you get to tax them again. Think about that——tax the taxes. This will start a spending spree like this world has never seen……. Spend it or loose it? I’m gonna spend..
The banks win because they get a handling fee for their services, the taxpayer wins because it’s money they never had, businesses win because they will have to hire employees. People will pay off their mortgages and so a lot of financial institutions will be bailed out and of course they will need new cars so the automotive industry will be bailed out. Where is it that anyone will loose more than what they are loosing now?

This is so silly it actually could work..

Yes, it all stops at the end of the 18 months but all the debt would have been erased and steps can be taken to prevent anything like this from happening again.

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Think of the economy as a tree, with the leaves as the Wall street financial whizz kids. The taxpayer can be the roots. The money can be the water that keeps it alive and running [this water is actually the sweat of the taxpayer from when he worked to make the money]. The government can be the gardner who waters the tree.

When the leaves get wet with water [money] the moisture gets sucked in and keeps everything going…….. for a while and not to well. The roots [taxpayer] will die and the whole tree [financial world] comes down. Now, water the roots with lots of water [money] and they will stay alive and the leaves[financial whizz kids] will do as they have always done-suck up the money and take the credit for keeping everything going.

If you sprinkle a bunch of that water [money called a bonus] on the leaves in addition to the roots, everybody is fine and it all works very well. The whizz kids make a bunch of money and make donations back to the parties they are trying to buy.

Isn’t this what happened to Americas’ financial world?

Doesn’t it sound like the gardner doesn’t know what to water, and should be replaced?

Dear Consumer,
You wouldn’t buy our cars, so we’re taking your money anyway. Now, you can pay for the car you have and also for the car you don’t have. Did you honestly think that years of market share loss would prod us into redesigning our cars to compete against the Japanese? He,he! After all, there’s only so much money to go around and those darn lobbyists are expensive.
Sincerely,
American Automakers Society for Unearned Income

Let me first say that I not a great Union supporter but having worked in the automotive field I see a great need for them. The Car industry treat you like crap and if it was not for the unions you would have no one working at these companies.
Everyone loves to trash the unions which sometimes they deserve but many fail to remember the horrible work conditions in the 30’s when men worked 14+ hours a day and where told you don’t like it ….leave, or how children were made to work in terrible work conditions. Is that what we want again? I don’t think so.
We gave 8 Trillion dollars to the thieves in the banking industry who are enslaving you with debt, and which the money that was given you will never see again but you don’t want to give a loan to a industry that supports 100,000’s of people and should be repaid. Does that make a lot of sense?

Also the painter who posted up above spoke of cutting wages. Yes sometimes we have to cut wages but is this the path we want to go down? Driving wages down instead of up? Do we want the USA to be a third world country with low wages? Maybe everybody should take a cut…say we all make $2.00 per hour
How does that sound. Then we will all have jobs and live like they do in Mexico or some other third rate nation. Smarten up people we need industry in the country, one of the reasons we are in this situation is there is no manufacturing base anymore. 70% of our economy is consumer spending.

Also many people have complained about American made cars. I have never owned anything but American made autos and have never had any major problems. Perception is reality people think the Japanese brands are better so they are…in there minds.

“a loan?” LOAN? We’re talking about a BAILOUT. Oh yeah, with strict government oversight. I can not imagine anything more disastrous than a business venture with government oversight (unless its a business venture using my money). We all know how successful the government is at managing money (or managing anything else) and for some crazy reason, congress still thinks the phrase “strict government oversight” puts folks minds at ease. Elections will come again. Does the phrase, “Throw the bums out” come to mind?

Everyone is getting down on the auto companies for building cars that don’t get good mileage but they were building what the consurmer wanted and it was fine until gas hit $4.00 per gallon and until the economy took a nose dive.

I think is is rediculous that we give almost a trillion dollars to AIG and the the banks and insurance companies and we not only allow them to give themselves huge bonuses (which they do not deserve if they take bail out money) but we don’t make them sell their corporate jets like we did to the auto execs.

This is a classic example of blue collar America vs white collar America. If you are white collar America you get a bailout with no strings attached and if you are blue collar America you have to grovel to congress. The republicans do not care about middle America they only care about big business.

Two more things, some see this as a convenient chance to break the auto unions by allowing the companies to go into bankrupcy. Secondly, the only way to make the auto companies competitive is by requiring them to increase their fleet mileage.

I’m Amish…..we do not use banks…or cars…or stock markets….and have never had any financial problem in 400 years.

The big three US auto makers were not building vehicles that the consumer wanted. They were building what their marketing departments told them to build. Dealers followed the marketing cues and filled their lots with those vehicles. Now salesmen had to convince customers to buy those ready-made and readily available vehicles, many with do-dads that the customer wasn’t thrilled with and often devoid of items that the customer yearned for.

If the car companies were truly building what the consumer wants, the dealers would take orders from the customers. The orders would be sent to the factory and the vehicle would be manufactured to the customers order.

That’s the way the auto industry used to work. That is how some car companies still do business. At smart and Aptera, customers even pay a reservation fee to get in queue to file their build order for the factory.

Marketing departments still don’t advertise practical vehicles used in a sensible manner. GM features Cadillac Escalades speeding from traffic light to traffic light. Chrysler features Dodge Ram pick-up trucks being thrashed about in a theme park like atmosphere. Ford forgets the basic purpose of a vehicle and marketst their radios and Sync system.

Any financial help is necessary for them. Indeed these three automakers need any financial assistance and support all the way to make greener performance auto parts cars for the future.

The auto industry is just one of the American industries that are asking from the government a bailout plan to save them. These days, we’ve seen that many people are on the brink of financial collapse and in need of help in order to survive. The three big auto companies already cut a large number of their workers just to keep it afloat. But, it seems that, it was not enough for them to survive, that’s why they already ask a bailout plan from the government. Nowadays, many people already loss their job. The unemployment lines are filling up with the recently laid off, and the numbers keep increasing. Many people wonder if they should get a payday loan if they just got a notice of lay off. Securing employment is the best thing to do right away. It is a much better idea to get money rolling in right now than to seek financing and additional debt. Relying on loans will never solve anything in the long run. If you find yourself facing a situation like this, it is better to find yourself another source of work and income to find a real solution to unemployment.