Bankruptcy and Reorganization for Detroit?

Have the people who support this lost their minds?

Consumers know reorganizations sometimes fail. Issues concerning
future availability of parts, resale value, and whether anyone will be
around to honor their warranties will be considered by them before
making a purchase from an automaker in bankruptcy reorganization.

Durable goods manufacturers cannot be operated successfully during
bankruptcy reorganization.

Taxpayer money cannot bail out Detroit. Only consumer money, spent on
the purchase of Detroit's vehicles, can bail them out. It appears way
too late for that.

 

No, its not.

Here's how to sell Detroit Iron:

1) Repeal the income tax - ALL of it.

2) The huge overhead of cars made in the USA incurred from the income tax is
removed, and "Detroit Iron" gets really cheap.

3) Replace the income tax with a consumption tax (don't whine about the poor -
they'll get compensation for the basic necessities of life).

4) The prices of cars built in this country are taxed back up to where they
used to be via the consumption tax.

5) People now have a whale of a lot more money by the amount of their income
tax witholding. Some will buy a new car, and that will be more than there were
before since they have all this extra money.

6) The cars _not_ built in this country, which were not experiencing the burden
of paying US income tax, will not experience the lowering of their price.

7) The cars _not_ built in this country will then be taxed by the amount of the
consumption tax.

8) The people that have decided to use their windfall $$$ from not paying
income tax to buy a car are way more likely to buy Detroit Iron, since it's
going to be waaaaay cheaper than the cars built other than in the USA.

6)

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_United_States_automobile_manufacturers

 

Basically probably OK, but I easily found several errors, and there
are probably more.

American Motors is listed as 1966-1987 and Rambler 1958-1969 but
actually the company American Motors was formed by a merger of Nash
and Hudson in 1954 and was the manufacturer of Rambler.

DeSoto was never a freestanding company, but instead was a brand of
Chrysler Corp. Oldsmobile is listed as through 2004 but it ceased to
exist as a company in... what, maybe 1915 when it went into GM.

Maxwell is listed through 1925, but at that point it was actually
Maxwell-Chalmers, and was renamed Chrysler... two years after the
company built the first Chrysler.

But anyway, your apparent point that failure of US automakers is
nothing new is well proven.

 

Well, we just doubled the federal debt in the last 8 years with mere
cuts in income taxes, so I suppose getting rid of income tax
completely wil.... I know... it will produce more total tax
revenue!!!! Ronald Reagan taken to the max!

Uh... do you realize that Detroit is losing money and therefor isn't
paying any income tax?

This is cute. The government is broke and your solution is merely to
the methods of collecting the same amount.

Wow. There's going to be a heck of a tax on Chevrolets, Fords, and
Dodges built in Canada and Mexico! And no tax at all on Hondas,
Toyotas, Nissans, and Subarus built in the US.

 

Interesting. Use CTRL-F to bring up the search, enter the year number, and see
what car company was started up or went out of business that year. Real
intersting.

 

Should be a great incentive for all those American companies that moved to
Mexico and Canada to move their manufacturing right back here, eh?

That's what we want...

 

A vast number of our current problems - housing boom followed by bust,
the truck boom followed by bust, high gas prices (again followed by a
huge drop, which isn't a problem of itself as much as it is indicative
of other problems) - have been caused by government distortion of the
markets. And your solution is to distort the markets more.

Who is we? Consumers have already shown what they want is cheaper
better cars, which are built either overseas or in the US by
**efficient** US companies like Honda America, Toyota USA, etc.

 

More like correcting a mistake. The income tax is a mistake - always has been.

 

After the government gave the bankers a trillion or more why shouldn't
everyone line up for something? It's really how this country has worked
for decades coming out in the open. If you want to be successful you
have to use the government to your favor. Maybe it's only regulations
that will cripple your competition. Maybe it's tax laws that force
family businesses to sell out. There's all sorts of ways that companies
get their success through government. It's just more out in the open
now.

 

Replace it with *NOTHING*. Stop having an empire that the country cannot
afford.

 

The debt doubled by having wars on credit and corporate welfare and
bailouts. Lowering taxes on individuals is never a bad thing.

 

How do you propose to run the gov't at all without any taxes? Wanna go the
Somalia route - no gov't at all? I imagine we can do that, but nobody would
like it, I think.

 

Nice strawman. I said replace the _federal income tax_ with nothing.
Without the federal income tax, federal government spending would
have to be rolled back to something like level it was in the mid 1990s.
The federal income tax is not the only federal tax. Before you lash out
you might want to do a wee bit of basic research. Constitutionally
limited government would be rather small and cheap to operate anyway.

As to your Somalia nonsense, first of all even if the federal government
were eliminated entirely there would still be tons of government in the
USA. City, county, and state. A far away central government trying to
micromanage everything is a monumentally bad idea anyway. Secondly,
Somalia starts to recover when there is no government, the problems are
from those who are trying to impose one by force. In other words, the
criminals who either create or eventually infest government. The people
themselves get on quite well without some government parasites taking
half of what they earn.

Why do you think not having a government that is trying to micromanage
our lives is so scary? Would you kill your neighbor for his stuff if the
government's police weren't around? I would think not. The criminals'
behavior isn't much altered by the presence of the government's police
either. It's really about how well the good people are knit together
than about the government's cops. The more people are isolated and
unable to act the easier the prey they become for the criminals. It
doesn't matter how many cops are around because they can't be
everywhere.

As to a country to be like from a standpoint of taxation and services
I would chose lichtenstein. The ruling prince of Lichtenstein is on
record as saying that a taxation rate of 6% is all that is needed to
provide the basic services and anything more is tyrannical.

 

That they want to buy Detroit's vehicles.

Unfortunately it does.
The lack of a plan at the Gov meeting, indicates they have no way to go.

 

You do realize that the revenue INCREASED in the last 8 years, right?

 

Here's how to sell Detroit Iron:

The problem with introducing a consumption tax and repealing the
income tax is that in 5 years politicians will easily reintroduce the
income tax, and we'll be socked with both of them.

 

Larry,

It did, but debt increased much faster. If you want numbers, the debt was
just about $5.8 trillion in 2000, is now over $10.6 trillion.

Yes, the economy has grown, but debt has grown faster. Our Debt-to-GDP ratio
was about 0.6 in 2000, is now 0.93. That means our debt is now equal to 93%
of our annual GDP.

And we continue to borrow money to try and stabilize a situation caused by
borrowing too much money.

Surely we can borrow our way out of debt. Reaganomics says so.

Allan

 

Make that 18 trillion.
http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=arEE1iClqDrk&refer=home
Fed Pledges Top $7.4 Trillion to Ease Frozen Credit (Update1)

Then there's another 50-60 trillion in obligations....

 

See 'Tariff'.