Yesterday in the Op-Ed Section of the New York Times, Mitt Romney gave his “prescriptions” for the ailing Detroit. And while some of his comments were rather stupid, he did have one sound suggestion.
Get rid of the planes, the executive dining rooms — all the symbols that breed resentment among the hundreds of thousands who will also be sacrificing to keep the companies afloat.
Duh. (And let me just say, last night, the auto execs were not slammed nearly enough for their opulence and luxuries, such as flying in on their $40 million private jets that cost $20,000 an hour to fly.)
Romney’s most asinine suggestion involved taking away the pensions for retirees:
Furthermore, retiree benefits must be reduced so that the total burden per auto for domestic makers is not higher than that of foreign producers.
However, there is a huge problem with that. Most foreign automobile makers do not incur the costs of employee healthcare and retirement the way U.S. businesses do. In these other countries this responsibility lies with the government, which allows for lower costs to the employer. The U.S. is lacking universal healthcare and our social security system is a joke. If they were to cut benefits for these retirees, what would that lead to?
However, stupid suggestions aside, the problem cannot be solved by another bailout. Obviously that didn’t work the first time. Didn’t we bail out Chrysler almost 30 years ago, and didn’t we approve $25 billion in aid in September? Obviously these bailouts have just prolonged the problem without offering any kind of working solution. Admittedly, I know very little about economic or financial matters (the extent of my knowledge can be summed up as the bits and pieces I’ve managed to retain from two college economic courses), however, it is apparent, even to me, that the entire industry needs restructuring. Yet, for the same reasons we can’t take away the pensions of retirees, we also can’t allow hundreds of thousands of people to lose their jobs.
This is probably naïve of me to ask, but is there not some sort of middle ground that wouldn’t contribute to the unemployment of more Americans?
Michael Moore actually had a good suggestion: go ahead and bail them out, but require them to retool for hybrids/electrics/mass transit.
Personally, I don’t know about even that. Bankruptcy exists for a reason – why do we need to spend more money? And even CNN is reporting on a domestic Honda plant whose business is booming.