Crush Liberalism

Detroit wants a bailout, and Barney Frank agrees

The Big Three automakers flew in on their private jets yesterday to complain to Congress as to how broke they are.  Predictably, they want a piece of the taxpayer-funded bailout pie.  They have a friend in Barney Frank, who is ready to toss Detroit a $100 billion life preserver.

Yes indeed, when Barney Frank isn’t busy stockpiling cases of petroleum jelly, he likes to spend his time sodomizing (resisting cheap shot here, folks!) the taxpayers by subsidizing failure.  And why shouldn’t we listen to him?  I mean, he did just a bang-up job subsidizing high risk mortgages, didn’t he?  Yet the left loves its losers, so they keep this buttclown in charge of matters of finance.  Brilliant.

This is harsh, but it needs to be said: Detroit must be allowed to fail, all the way to the end.  Ace has a great post about it, but here are some excerpts:

And any “bailout” (really a permanent taxpayer subsidy of far too high UAW wages) simply goes to keeping nonsense like this in place.

And don’t say their wages are “far too high” as some sort of judgment about the value of their work. I say they’re far too high based on the objective fact that they cannot produce a competitive product at those rates. And add in that non-union plants in the South and other areas of the country pay their workers $43.00 per hour in total benefits — a pretty decent wage for manufacturing work requiring little previous skill — while the UAW insists on $73.00 per hour.

You get almost double what other workers are willing to work for why, exactly? I can’t imagine any moral claim to such rates.
…
From a 2005 article:

Ken Pool is making good money. On weekdays, he shows up at 7 a.m. at Ford Motor Co.’s Michigan Truck Plant in Wayne, signs in, and then starts working — on a crossword puzzle.

Pool hates the monotony, but the pay is good: more than $31 an hour, plus benefits.”We just go in and play crossword puzzles, watch videos that someone brings in or read the newspaper,” he says. “Otherwise, I’ve just sat.”

Pool is one of more than 12,000 American autoworkers who, instead of installing windshields or bending sheet metal, spend their days counting the hours in a jobs bank set up by Detroit automakers and Delphi Corp. as part of an extraordinary job security agreement with the United Auto Workers union.

The jobs bank programs were the price the industry paid in the 1980s to win UAW support for controversial efforts to boost productivity through increased automation and more flexible manufacturing.

As part of its restructuring under bankruptcy, Delphi is actively pressing the union to give up the program.

With Wall Street wondering how automakers can afford to pay thousands of workers to do nothing as their market share withers, the union is likely to hear a similar message from the Big Three when their contracts with the UAW expire in 2007 — if not sooner.

“It’s an albatross around their necks,” said Steven Szakaly, an economist with the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor. “It’s a huge number of workers doing nothing. That has a very large effect on their future earnings outlook.” …  

Bailing out Detroit simply guarantees that the unions that have destroyed Motown will continue their cannibalism…but will drag down the rest of the country with them.

November 20, 2008 Posted by crushliberalism | Barney Frank, Detroit, economic ignorance, unions | 1 Comment