AFP: Obama to set up task force on crippled US auto industry
WASHINGTON (AFP) — President Barack Obama will not now entrust a “car czar” with restructuring US auto giants but will launch a presidential task force on the crippled industry, an administration official said.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and White House economic advisor Lawrence Summers will oversee the task force, the official said, a day before General Motors and Chrysler must submit restructuring plans to the government.
Well, the answer is now becoming clear and obvious - Geitner will simply advise the automakers to forget to pay their taxes.
Which, actually, wouldn’t be all that bad an idea.
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The solution is simple. It’s called bankruptcy. GM etc. have plenty of assets and somebody would buy many of them at a market price. There is a demand for cars and we would not be without US automakers for long. A lot of GM employees would lose their have-always-been-unaffordable pensions and health care, but, shoot, we have a bloated federal system to cover them anyway, no need to nationalize the auto industry. Meanwhile, we could have a class action suit to bankrupt all of the GM executives to pay back pennies on the dollar for those losses. (I have no sympathy for the executives).
Eventually the oversupply of cars would wind down, demand and supply will rise in tandem and people will start buying and selling U.S. cars again. The interim will suck but all efforts to repeal the business cycle have so far ended in calamity, time to suck it up instead of growing the calamity.
(About here I expect to get accused of not caring about unemployed auto workers.)
Instead, I expect more of this: full nationalization of GM etc. just like FNMA.
This is the ad campaign the GOP needs to have in 2010:
“The Democrats gave your children’s money to auto workers to keep them in business even though nobody wanted the cars. When your children are paying that debt, will you still vote Democrat? “