Quote:
Originally Posted by Trample the Elderly
Had they not bailed out Chrystler or GM the public would've paid nothing. They still had the option of filling bankruptcy to restructure. Delta did that and they're still flying. Our government shouldn't be acting like any other government. If everyone jumped off a bridge would you do it too?
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Delta didn't have to worry about losing a majority of it's market share to foreign competition. In that case, a bailout would have been overkill.
If they hadn't bailed out GM, the loss of labor in the auto industries and the industries that were dependent on the auto industry in the form of unemployment taxes. Taxpayers would have been screwed anyway. Right now, there isn't sufficient economic growth in other industries to offset the exponential loss of jobs. Maybe in another place, another time, it would have been beneficial to force the auto industries to head into a more traditional bankruptcy process, but considering that demand for automobiles isn't going anywhere in the immediate future, we'd just be directly killing our GDP by not doing so. So, yeah, maybe the actual path we are going to take isn't much better, but it's certainly not worse, at least in the short term.
Where this has the potential to be worse is if the temporary economic stimulus solutions become permanent (think New Deal). But that's a different issue entirely. And even though Obama's plans seem to take that into effect, it's probably going to be up to his successor to actually see that part through. The long term effects of this bail-out are likely not in his control.