Welcome back!

Hello everyone. After a three-month absence I’m back.
They say nothing kills a blog faster than not keeping a schedule. If this blog had any readers it would have suffered dramatically but I don’t think anyone noticed that I wasn’t there for a while. Anyway here I am and today I’m going to broach the proposed Automakers government bailout and other tidbits.
Seems like Canadian interests in Detroit and Washington are considering a bailout of the Big Three automakers. Most polls that I have seen in recent days indicate that the public are not enamoured of using their tax dollars to bailout private companies.
Most workers in the States make an average of $15/hour and government would want taxpayers to subsidize the companies whose autoworkers make $75 dollar/hour. Doesn’t seem quite fair does it.
Now the automakers are claiming that failing to help them survive the current financial crisis would hurt average families and deal a “catastrophic” blow to the economy of both Canada and the US.
They say that if one automaker is allowed to go bankrupt, the entire sector would crumble because they share the same suppliers, resulting in millions of lost jobs and diminished government tax revenue.
If you think about it this is throwing money at companies that have failed to fix their businesses over the years and will only delay their bankruptcy. They have claimed that they have lost billions of dollars and eliminated 500,000 U.S. jobs over the past 15 years. These were in the good years of massive prosperity in North America. Do you think that maybe there is something wrong with their business plan? All this is happening while the unions in Canada are unwilling to budge from their positions in the hope of helping their own employers.
Remember the $75/hour jobs. I think they might have a little manoeuvring room and lend a hand instead of letting taxpayers take all the risk in bailing them out.
What’s really curious is that government is ready to throw bucketfuls of money at the automakers but did not offer the forest industry a sou for their bailouts.
The forest industry in Canada is larger that both the automakers and the arrow space industry combined. When their industry started to fail several years ago they knew that they had to adapt or go out of business. The BC NDP government in the 90’s actually tried a $400 million dollar bailout of Skeena Cellulose. It failed miserably leaving the taxpayers of the province holding the bag. Several years and thousand of job losses later the industry id now lean and mean. They may not be selling many 2X4’s but they are ready to take on the world when the time comes.
Instead of asking for handouts now would be time for the automobile industry to cull the deadwood start being innovative and start looking at he future not as a black hole but an opportunity to produce better more affordable products that taxpayers are genuinely happy to buy.