11/20 "Far from vanishing, many of GM’s assets would be quickly purchased
by competent foreign automakers eager to expand their capacity in what
is the world’s largest auto market. Happily, the list of well-run car
companies, from Toyota to Nissan to Porsche, is long."
big FAT LOLZ there. When GM closes up, GM's factories are going to
go idle and rust and provide excellent opporunities for hipster
dumbasses who love breaking into buildings to photograph our
crumbling industrial past glory. Those jobs are not coming back, EVER.
\_ GM is a modestly profitable car company with a huge losing pension
fund attached. In bankruptcy, they will be able to dump the
pension liabilities onto the government and return profitable.
\_ which I would argue this is a sure sign of incompetitiveness of
USA as a whole. Then again, if Pension were funded properly,
shouldn't be a problem. My guess is that during the go-go days,
GM decided to use the pension contribution and count it as profit.
GM decided to use the pension contribution and count it as
profit.
\_ No, it is mostly an artifact of the fact that we push health
care costs onto private employers, while that cost is borne
by The State for GMs competitors. Even offloading all the
pensioners healthcare costs alone would make GM profitable.
The GM management (and unions) decided to forstall a bunch
of labor issues in the 70's by increasing benefits, which we
are paying the price of now, but no one could have reasonably
expected health care costs to increase at 7%/yr for 30 years.
\_ not just the 70s and not just GM. This happened with a lot
of city/county governmental orgs as well. The contra costa
county school district is going to be bankrupt due to
quickly increasing pension/medical benifits for retired
quickly increasing pension/medical benefits for retired
staff.
\_ Of course, those evil socialist countries fund health
care by TAXES on corporations. But we could never tax
corporations here, because that would make us
uncompetitive. Or so goes the corpratist line. -tom
\_ Right, because corporations here don't pay any taxes
ever. There's no way an evil corporation like
XOM would pay any tax.
\_ That statement is becoming more true every year.
In the 50s, 1/3 the federal tax revenue came from
corporations, today it's 7% and still dropping.
Assuming the corporists that run the government
continue their successfuly campaign to eliminate
taxes on corporations whenever possible, it's
conceivable that will go down to 0% in a decade
or two. -!tom |
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