If you came here today expecting a fabulous story about me sharting myself or one of my kids peeing on me or a story about Avitable masturbating to clown porn, you can forget it.
Today, I am inspired to write to you about something that matters to me and, if you truly care about your future and the future of this country, you should care about it too.
First off, there’s the 700 billion (850 or 900 billion) bailout of the financial sector. I can’t begin to tell you I’m smart enough to work the ins and outs or claim to even understand 5% of the whole thing, and unless you’re my dad, you can’t either.
That said, we are THE leader of the free world and have a gigantic affect on the global economy as a whole. So having Wall Street collapse and our entire financial system go tits up was not and is not a viable option. So I understand, I guess. And by saying I understand, that is ignoring the giant elephant in the room regarding these bad mortgages, and that is that no one is taking responsibility for signing their names 435 times agreeing to pay for something they didn’t have a chance in hell of being able to afford ever, but as long as a trained mortgage professional told them that 58% of your gross income locked into your mortgage was a good decision, then it had to be…right?
This is just another example of how our country has adopted the TODDI (The Other Dude Did It) excuse for everything wrong in their life, regardless of how stupid and irresponsible they acted along the way. This is the same mentality that has seen juries give dumbfuckers who put molten coffee against their genitals 10 million dollars and people that smoked for 40 years a billion dollars, because of course the smoker didn’t "KNOW" smoking was bad for them. But I digress…
So I understand on the surface that this bailout is necessary to avoid a bigger problem in the near or far future. Fine. I’ll ignore the earmarking jackasses in congress that had to get their pound of flesh before approving it. That’s another story for another day.
The issue for me is, now that the bailout has more or less passed and Obama has been elected, Ms. Pelosi and her friends have decided that there also needs to be a bailout of the American Auto Industy, because God forbid we see three humongous shittily run businesses go under.
Before I get all the way down this road, I’d like to reiterate my disdain for all unions in our modern world. Unions were necessary in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s to keep companies from forcing 7 year old kids to work 20 hour days seven days a week in coal mines and such. A union wasn’t meant to make sure Alex Rodriguez got 25 million a year instead of 23 million a year, and it was intended to make sure that some high school dropout got paid an average of $71 PER HOUR (that’s over $140,000 a year) to put a nut on a fucking bolt.
Currently, General Motors is paying medical benefits for one million people. They’re not a car maker. They’re an insurance company. And they’re not good at that either.
Currently, there is approximately $1,600 dollars of medical costs and $1000 of vacation costs built into every GM/Ford/Chrysler vehicle.
Conversely, non-union companies like Toyota have about $200 per car built in for the same things.
So someone, anyone, please tell my why in Christ’s name the US taxpayers should be handed some 100+ billion dollar bailout bill to save (temporarily) a horridly run industry? In the real world, if you suck at running your business, eventually you go out of business. The airlines and the automakers don’t deserve any extra help for being stupid. They deserve to go out of business. Then someone else can come in, do it better, and maybe even right, and make that industry profitable.
Or not.
But it is not the government’s business to pick and choose which industry it deems worthy of welfare.
Shit, I had a small business with a bad model and I lost money and closed it down. Where was my bailout? Where was my government support?
And here’s another question. Why weren’t any of these folks putting away some of their 140 grand a year when they knew the industry was going in the shitter? I mean, it’s not like Ford started sucking in 2007. The US automakers have been losing billions per quarter for years.
The answer is the same for both. Those workers being paid well above what their work was worth just assumed that the gravy train would go on forever and it would never catch up with them.
I only hope that’s the case.
And a second note. If the US economy wants to get better, how about passing a comsumption based tax to replace the taxing of income? Then you’d see industries that have left the US return and consume and spend here instead of in Ireland and Asia. I have yet to hear one compelling arguement against the Fair Tax. All I ever get are dumbshits like Jim Martin saying that the Flat Tax people want to add a 23% sales tax to everything you buy. And he knows that’s not true. At least I think he does. If he doesn’t, then he doesn’t deserve to wash my ass, let alone be a US Senator (aka one of the people that makes big finance-related decisions in this country and for this country).
In closing, I’d like to say fuck you to GM, Chrysler and Ford, as well as Nancy Pelosi and anyone else that thinks that it’s the government’s job to do shit like this. It’s not. How about reading the Declaration of Independence sometime, or maybe the US Constitution. Maybe you’d get a refresher in what government really should be, and more importantly, what it should NOT be.
What say you?