Wow, so many people in the US out work GM Job went over seas that's not right.
Guys that become fully competent in thier jobs with less than a year of On the Job Training knocking down double the average engineer with 5-6 years of college and 20 years experience might have somehting to do with that as well:ummm:
There are many facets to this I realize but strong labor pricing itself out of the market is a piece of the puzzle that can't be denied.
US car companies rebadging imports is nothing new, that's been going on for decades, in attempts to "see if they'll stick" which usually they don't, the American public generally does not want these crackerboxes and the US makers that get roped into being forced to import them to satisfy EPA fleet mileage requirements don't want to waste their money doing R&D on **** box cars they know the public won't buy anyway.
As for bailout money and the thingking that goes behind it, it's all total ********, especially the philosophy of ANY company being "Too big to be allowed to fail"
The free market should reign, if a company can not make it financially with thier chosen business model then they should be allowed to succeed or fail on thier own merit.
The only reason the bailouts happened is to prop up voter support for the politicians pushing these programs from the states effected by these business failures.
Government bailout (or subsidy) of private business is a false economy, and while I'll be the first to admit that it does benefit business, the public, and some workers in the short term, the long term implications are what makes it false and ultimately doomed to fail or else drive costs elsewhere by shiftting those losses to the public tax rolls or to the consumer.
The business I'm in has benefited hugely short term from gov't subsididy of alternative energy but eventually the cost will come home to roost when the expansion driven by these subsidies contracts back to it's natural state because political support dries up, or regulation forces these businesses (EXAMPLE; Ca passed a law requiring utilities to obtain a certain percentage of their power from these sources, the EPA also has regs requiring gasoline producers to use specific amounts of "new" formulas requiring additives that aren't even being made anywhere except on an experimental basis) to keep producing without the subsidies and the increased cost ends up in the consumers mailbox whether he wanted it or not.