the market-- it's a changin'...the government-- it's a subsidizin' failure
Mark Steyn in Jewish World Review with some insightful and funny observations on the failure of the Big Three, newspapers and California...
Steyn opens by comparing the market valuation of GM to Bed, Bath & Beyond (one-third) and Toyota (less than 3%). Then, he starts dropping bombs:
General Motors, like the other two geezers of the Old Three, is a vast retirement home with a small money-losing auto subsidiary. The UAW is AARP in an Edsel: It has three times as many retirees and widows as "workers" (I use the term loosely). GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people.How do you make that math add up? Not by selling cars...
So many areas of endeavor that once embodied the youth and energy of this great land are now old and sclerotic. I include, naturally, my own industry. I loved the American newsrooms you saw in movies like "The Front Page," full of hard-boiled, hard-livin' newspapermen. By the time I got there myself, there were no hard-boiled newspapermen, just bland, anemic newspaperpersons turning out politically correct snooze sheets of torpid portentousness....The newspapers blame the Internet, just as Detroit blames Japan....
Ah, California. The Golden State! To a penniless immigrant named Arnold Schwarzenegger, it was a land of plenty. Now Arnold is an immigrant of plenty in a penniless land....And when Gov. Girlyman has run out of state taxpayers to fleece for his ever-more-bloated bureaucracy, he'll go to Washington to plead for a federal bailout of Cantaffordya....
posted by Eric Schansberg @ 2:34 PM
2 Comments
2 Comments:
>GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people.
Perhaps this says less about the domestic auto industry and more about our health care system.
I don't see how. Auto workers are upper-middle income class and members of a labor market cartel and a powerful interest group.
The health care/insurance problems impact the lower income classes (although they're picked up by the govt) and the lower-middle and middle-classes (the vast majority of those without insurance).
The semi-bizarre thing is that workers would set up a system where so much compensation is deferred. We don't see that anymore, given the lack of oligopoly/stability in high-profit, naturally and artificially protected industries, such as autos.
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