Quote:
Originally Posted by PaulS
Semantics. looks to me like those 800 jobs are being bailed out. The auto manuf. paid back what they were lent.
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No, it's fact. Claiming that giving tax incentives to Carrier is giving money to them is semantics. "Bailing out" the jobs is not bailing out the company. The company was going to move. It didn't ask for a bail out. It was not in the position of going out of business, bail out or not.
The auto companies were not in the process of relocating to another country. And many "conservatives" were against the TARP bailout. Even Mitt Romney argued that the auto companies should go through the private bankruptcy process instead of the government giving them corporate "welfare."
The government incentives given to Carrier did not cost the government money, it saved the government some money that it would have lost if all the jobs were deported.
If the auto companies had gone through bankruptcy (which they basically did except with government financing) there would not have been government picking winners and losers. If GM and Chrysler had gone out of business, the other car manufacturers would have provided the cars that the public needed. They would probably have had to expand and hire more workers.
As it was, the old GM and Chrysler did essentially go out of business under government restructuring and became the new and different GM and Chrysler.
And, as a minor point, it is debatable whether the companies actually paid back all the money. But whether they did or not, is beside the point. The point is should our government be in the business of bailing out business. And if it should, should it choose which businesses to bail out while leaving others to fail. Many, many businesses fail in this country every year. Only a very select few have the government bail them out as it did with the auto companies. The real threat of government control of private industry when it "saves" business, especially selected business, is a facilitator of the cronyism between big business and big government that we see growing today.