Now a Bailout of GM?

I’m not saying anything here that hasn’t been said much eloquently elsewhere, but it’s incredible to me that there will likely be a huge bailout of GM — and the Other Two — within the next few months, and perhaps much less if Congress gets their way. Let me say this for posterity: this is a bad, bad idea. It rewards bad business decisions, as in entering unsubstainable contracts with the UAW, as well as putting all your eggs in the truck and SUV basket. It pushes the problem down the road, as this issue will not go away just by throwing money at it. It gets close (or will, depending on the bailout package) to having a true, honest-to-God socialist government stake in a major manufacturing sector, reducing market responsiveness, reducing efficiency, and ensuring further degradation of the American-owned auto industry. In other words, it’s bad, all around.

And it’s almost certainly going to happen. Why? Because Democrats in change — including President-Elect Obama — are the same old politics. They are beholden to those interests that put them there, and in this case, one of those interests are the labor unions. A new kind of politics? Prove it. This is the incoming administration’s first test of that claim. As far as how toxic this is for America and it’s people, this is just as bad as being beholden to corporate interests. It’s putting a benefactor’s interest ahead of the country’s citizens.

This is going to come back and haunt is horribly in the future.