Hahahaha...that's a good one. That is one of the more patently silly 
statements I've seen in awhile not coming from the Bush administration. 
You aren't part of the Bush administration, right?

Did it not occur to you that the people wiping the floor with our auto 
industry (think Japan and Germany here) have unions too? That they 
generally have a stronger labor voice and their employees get better 
healthcare and more time off? And you really think that its the UAW 
that's taking down GM? That's a freakin laugh riot.

Japan and Germany have kicked ass for two big reasons: They don't have 
to pay extraordinary amounts for private health care and retirement and 
they have been making cars that people want to buy. The costs for health 
care and retirement are spread out amongst all the companies in those 
countries and there isn't the same profit hungry machine driving up 
health care costs at the rate they are in the US. GM has said that it 
adds $1500 per car just to cover health care costs. That's a fair bit of 
overhead to factor into a product that has to compete with ones from 
socialized countries where the manufacturers don't have the same overhead.

But probably as much as anything else, the US has sucked at making cars 
that people want to buy. Pure and simple. They were surging ahead for 
awhile with the dawn of the SUV. It was higher margin and they got on 
the bandwagon first. But the cycle from design of a car to actually 
rolling into the lots takes years. And for whatever reason, it didn't 
occur to US auto makers that bigger and bigger wasn't going to be 
sustainable. That gas costs could spike, that environmental concerns 
might start taking hold. And lo and behold, the cars they were making 
were ones that people didn't want to buy anymore. Can't really blame the 
unions for that.

Judah


Jerry Johnson wrote:
> I agree totally.
> 
> The unions in the auto industry are the single most likely reason that
> the American Auto industry will collapse. Taking with it huge swaths
> of the country's economy.
> 
> Did you catch Jim Kramer's rant? One of the tidbits is that GM is the
> single largest purchaser of Viagra in the world.
> 
> I wonder how many pills per car buyers are currently paying for.



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