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In November, Bill Maher had a great line regarding the “financial fiasco”:
“New Rule: Hank Paulson must drop the $700 billion in bailout money from a plane and let everyone scramble for it on the ground. Sure, it’ll be chaos, but at least this way we have a chance of getting our money back.”
Yes, it’s a funny line. But, the satire does not need to stop with the
Try this one. Since the 1970’s, every candidate for president, for the
One part of the program was to establish some standard for gas mileage for a car manufacturer to meet. It was a standard for their “fleet” so the And, then the Congress outdid themselves using the tax code. They gave an incentive for businesses and self-employed people to purchase gas-guzzlers. Thus, folks could take a 100% deduction of the costs immediately. For example, anyone purchasing a $75,000 SUV wrote off $75,000. In the highest tax bracket, that meant the federal government gave the owner $25,000 plus. And, the government borrowed the money from China to fund the giveaway for Americans to buy more gas-guzzlers. Next, how about that foreign oil? Well, the Congress approves of going to war in Iraq to protect the foreign oil supply. World’s only superpower, you know. So, the federal government borrows more money from China to pay for that war. (Are we seeing a pattern here?) And, guess what? The price of gas soared above $4 per gallon. Now few people want to buy such vehicles. Thus, the auto companies are losing money because they staked their success on gas-guzzling big-ticket vehicles. So what happens now? Well, the Congress says it has to bail out the auto companies. And, of course, to do that they have to borrow more money from China. Maybe Bill Maher is actually on to something. Maybe throwing money from airplanes, or maybe from skyscrapers, should be discussed in Congress. All things considered, it might have cost America less. In 1928, on his radio program, Will Rogers observed: “No nation in the history of the world was ever sitting so pretty. If we want anything, all we have to do is go and buy it on credit. So that leaves us without any economic problems whatever, except some day to have to pay for them,” he told America. “But we are certainly not thinking about that this early.” One year later, the stock market crashed big-time. Oh, yes, it rose to new records before finally settling to a new low in 1932. Stocks had lost 90% of their value.
Click here to contact your representatives in Washington, D.C.: – Byron
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Tags: Bill Maher, China, Hank Paulson, Iraq, Will Rogers
Shooting off his mouth about subjects that he knows little or nothing about is what made Bill Maher famous. He is sometimes very funny, but he has never been accused being very intelligent and shouldn’t be taken seriously about anything.
Politicians making promises that they don’t keep. What else do you expect? No matter what they promise, nobody in the world can make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. The politicians can make rules regarding gas mileage standards, but scientific and engineering advances don’t follow their rules. If vehicles that get better gas mileage could be made, the Japanese, German, British and French manufacturers would have done it.
Few people understand that both domestic and foreign automakers are suffering major losses. That is because they put much of their capital and manufacturing effort into building vehicles that buyers wanted – pickups, vans and sport utility vehicles. When gas was cheap, consumers bought those gas guzzlers like hotcakes. When gas went up to $4.00 and more per gallon, the demand fell off sharply, leaving the automakers with large inventories.
Adding to their problem is the credit crisis. Since lenders tightened their standards for consumer loans, sales of all models from all manufacturers have fallen dramatically. The lenders also tightened the requirements for commercials loans, making it even harder for the automakers to acquire capital. The only source of capital left for them is the taxpayer. Foreign manufacturers haven’t had to ask their governments for loans because they are already heavily subsidized by taxpayers.
Let’s use our major competitor in the auto industry, Japan, as an example. Japanese workers have government provided health care that amounts to a very large subsidy that is paid for with tax dollars. Here employers provide that benefit to their employees. Perhaps if we had a national health care plan, the American automakers would have the money to get them over the hump created by the oil and credit crises that they did nothing to cause.
Another subsidy is provided to Japanese manufacturers by their government’s intervention to artificially devalue the yen in currency markets by upwards of 30% since 2001. As a result, Japanese automakers receive a $4,000 to $14,000 subsidy on every vehicle they export to the US. The Japanese government’s policy of maintaining a weak yen inhibits fair trade and is a real issue that deserves scrutiny.
New Rule: Every tax payer gets $8,000 from the TARP fund. This will immediately provide families with the ability to be active consumers, and there will be a trickle down to banks and Wall Street.
New Rule: Every time the GOP suggests a tax credit, remind them that it only works when people are actually employed with an income to cover their basic expenses, and does nothing to put money immediately into the economy. The same could be said for the health care tax credit — if no job, then no real benefit from a credit.
Thanks for good post