UPDATE
http://www.tmcnet.com/...
while i'm greatly relieved, i'm still not a fan of the bailouts or the stimulus package. they're junk spending.
my original diary is in the body for what it's worth.
back when the automakers were pushing for a bailout, most of the conservatives and some democrats in congress were arguing against it, and rightly so. daily kos was full of people with nothing nice to say about the opponents of the spending. i remember one particularly hyperbolic article on the front page which equated opposition to the automaker bailout with being unpatriotic, or something like that.
the bailout happened, as you all recall, and some workers are getting some help.
i bet you weren't counting on the workers being in brazil.
so much for creating jobs at home, eh?
we've been seeing the fallout of the bank bailout for months now. reckless expenditures, zero lending, huge bonuses, etc.
the automaker bailout was doomed to failure from the outset. it was, frankly, a terrible idea. this had nothing to do with the workers, the unions, or really the automakers themselves. simply put, car sales are down. tough shit. a company needs to learn to deal with that sort of thing, not go crying to the government for help.
the fundamental problem with throwing money at a problem is that doing so does not solve the problem.
a downturn in lending requires a reevaluation of lending practices and interest rates, not an artificial injection of capital.
a downturn in car sales requires a realignment of production, not a handout to pay the bills for a couple months while demand continues to languish.
nobody apparently wants to admit the possibility that too many loans were being made and too many cars were being produced and the people consuming these products could only do so by taking on debt they didn't have the means to pay back. the correction for this is to simply let lending and production scale back to demand, not to force supply into a market which doesn't need it. the correction is ugly, it's painful, it's going to cost jobs, hurt families, sink businesses, but it's what we can do now.
if the government continues to create debt by investing in unproductive enterprises, and foist the bill on generations yet to come, those future generations are going to get stuck with the ugly correction instead of us. is that the legacy we really want to leave our children, and their children?