this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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Hence the steel production collapse I mentioned.
There's something to be said about subsidizing corporate profits, but there is a limit to how much they can compete with production from places like China that have notoriously cheap production. Especially if we also take wage issues in the US into consideration. It's not cheap to pay affordable wages.
As for the type of cars built domestically, I can only imagine that local ev competition would help crib the "planet killers". Foreign cars are hardly going to change that.
There's everything to say about this. Taxpayers have bailed out the Big Three how many times now? Ford, GM, and Stellantis should have gone bankrupt 10x over. Maybe we could've actually had a pro-consumer domestic market and not the hostage situation we have now with their lobbyists fixing congress for the past century.
Kinda like how the domestic makers handicapped EV adoption at every step for the past three decades? They have absolutely no interest in providing good, reliable, and sustainable cars for people. The profits are in massive, energy inefficient, loaded with who-asked-for-this? ''features'' and they know full well that the only way to sell these to people is by making fair competition illegal.
Um.... Ford never was bailed out. GM was bailed out once. Stellantis / Chrysler was also bailed out once.
Finally, the US Government made money with the bailout. Hard to criticize the situation when we made a profit / removed some of our debt over it.
I'd do it again, frankly. Sometimes people need a loan, the loan terms were good and beneficial, and we made money from it. What is there to complain about?
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/20/business/us-signals-end-of-bailouts-of-automakers-and-wall-street.html
So two full "we cant even hide this one, its a bailout" bailouts? Plus, however, many times that the Big Three should've gone bankrupt if not for lobbying Congress? Look at how scared they are over affordable EVs entering the market because they know how quick they'd go under if they had some actual competition.
The second point is intentionally misleading. The source shows that "we" (not me) made a profit (3% over six years isn't a profit, it's inflation) off auto and bank bailouts. How much damage has been caused by the Big Three since they learned they could run their companies directly against the desires of the market and get away with it?