Detroit Bail-out

So, the CEO's of the Big Three American car manufactures used their own private planes to fly to Washington to request billions of dollars from the government? That's so sick on so many different levels that I don't know where to begin.

I learned early on in my adulthood that American-made cars were genuinely inferior to foreign-made. My parents owned a ten year-old Mercedes when I got my driver's license, and it drove light years better than any American-made piece of crap. Over the next few years, I owned a hand-me-down Chevy station wagon, a Plymouth Duster, an Oldsmobile Delta 88, and a Ford Pinto. In one way or another, they were all pieces of unadulterated garbage. I'll never forget one time driving home from law school for the weekend in my "blow-up-in-the-back" Pinto, and the damn thing was unable to get up a hill on the Taconic Parkway. I couldn't believe it, we're not exactly talking about a highway in the Rocky Mountains here. What a hunk of junk.

The first new car I bought was a Toyota Corolla in 1988. I turned over the odometer on that car twice, and was working on the third time when I got into an accident and totaled the car through no fault of the vehicle in 2001. That car was built like a tank, and I'm thoroughly convinced that, but for that accident, I would still be driving it.

My next car was a two year-old Dodge Durango. It got a whopping fourteen miles to the gallon, and over the next few years, I probably put between eight and ten thousand dollars worth of work into it. Yes sir, another wonderful piece of Detroit technology. I now drive a Toyota Highlander, one of those mini-SUV things that actually gets almost thirty miles to the gallon, and should still be good twenty years from now. As far as I'm concerned, I will never buy another American vehicle again. That is, unless there are major changes in the American auto industry.

I'm not talking about minor changes, I'm talking about major, industry-revitalizing changes. I'm talking about quality product, a productive work force, competitive pricing, and a total re-structuring of the company compensation system. I guess I'm talking about the auto industry as it exists in Japan. Right, like that will ever happen here. Not when you have the sort of mentality where CEO's fly in private jets to beg for government charity. Disgusting.

So remind me again why in the world my tax dollars should go to bail out this failed industry, which has ripped off the American consumer for the last four decades? Tell me why, if these CEO's are rich enough to own their own jets, they can't improve their businesses without a hand-out from us? Tell me why I should care.