Delphi Proposal to Cut Wages in Half!

What you seem to believe to be true, is not. Foreign manufacture do not
'come to the US and build factories and vehicles.' What they do is merely
assemble vehicles of imported parts, in plants build with taxpayers money
via bond issues, with under paid workers, with few benefits, that were
trained buy the states. To add insult to injury they take the profits they
earn in this country, out of the county federal corporate tax free.
American manufactures, to stay competitive, are being forced to seek lower
priced parts and reduced payroll and benefit costs that are closer to those
costs in the subsidized foreign operated plants.

mike hunt

 

In my case I'm still working and so am covered under an employer-paid plan.
It happens to be a catastrophic-type plan coupled with a HSA (Health
Savings Account) My employer switched to that almost as soon as Congress
authorized them, to escape the premium creep. The plan does not kick
anything in until you exceed $10K a year in health expenses, although if you
use a preferred provider they cannot bill you more than whatever the set
rates
are that the insurance company has setup.

Initially there was resistance but actually everyone in the company has
benefited,
I know I have. Previously, what would happen under the HMO is that my
employer paid something like $250/mth (This is a guesstimate, as I don't
know
exactly what the dollar amount was) for me and my dependents, and the
copays were dinging us about $20 per visit, plus invariably we would get
charged more money for tests and other
bullshit that was only partly covered by the HMO. I know in one year we
paid out around $1200 due to miscellaneous bullshit uncovered medical
expenses.
And I think it was about $3K for the birth of each of our children even
though
once again, this was supposed to be an hmo that covered everything.

After the switch, what my employer pays is still something like that $250
but instead only $50 goes to the insurance company. (once again this is
a guesstimate, as I don't know exactly what it is he's paying) What I get
is $200 monthly going into that HSA where I write checks from directly
to the doctor. If you don't go to the doctor the money just keeps piling up
in that account (although, it's not usable for anything other than medical
expenses) So far we have not incurred more medical expenses than there
has been money in the account. So it has resulted in basically all the
nickel-and-diming and test fees and other bullshit
being completely covered by disbursements from the HSA.

Now, obviously if there is something serious then it's unlikely what is
in the HSA will cover the deductible so we will be out of pocket. But
this is a law of averages game. If your not sick or no one in your family
gets seriously ill for a number of years then you will stockpile money in
the HSA and then when something does come around that is serious,
someone breaks an arm or some such, then you are OK.

Where these plans are a bitch is if you have someone who has a
chronic problem that isn't drop-dead serious, yet still runs up the
costs every year into the $8-12K region. In the company I work
at, nobody has that, fortunately, which is one of the reasons they
were so quick to switch to it when these plans became available.

Ted

 

This is absolute rubbish. Every time someone points out the basis of a
progressive
tax system you get someone bitching that a progressive tax system means that
we don't want rich people to live richly. This is absolute crap.

I -want- rich people to be able to buy toys and such because doing so
encourages
them to make even more money, thus paying more taxes, thus helping me
indirectly.

The only time a progressive tax system is counterproductive is when the
highest
tax brackets -exceed- 50% of income. However up to 50% is no problem. If
someone is making a billion bucks a year in income, losing 500 million of it
to the
society that is paying him the billion bucks is certainly fair. If he wants
more money
he can then make 2 billion bucks next year, and he will then get his
billion.

The money that these rich are making has absolutely no value unless the
infrastructure exists to manufacture these toys that they want to buy with
their
500 million bucks. And you, I and everyone else make up that
infrastructure.
If we wern't working, those few rich wouldn't have the 500 million to do
what
they wanted with. If we wern't working then even if they had that 500
million
they wouldn't be able to buy anything with it. Do you really think it would
be
any fun to own your own Lear jet and Rolls Royce if every road in the
country
you lived in was a dirt road, since everyone in the country was dirt poor?
Would
there be any point to being rich enough to get your own way politically
whenever
you wanted, when the only thing that the government of the country your
living
in was doing was beating the crap out of people?

When they took Saddam out in Iraq and went touring through his palaces, how
much of the toys that were in there were manufactured in Iraq? I don't
think more
than a few percent. That's the issue with being rich. There's no point in
being
rich in a world where everyone else is destitute. Its's only worth being
rich in
a world where there's lots of toys to be able to spend your money on, and
lots of
things to do with your money, whether it be starting companies, funding
save-the-whales
campaigns, or whatever your fancy. And all those choices of things for you
to do
to amuse yourself cannot exist unless there's sufficient money in the rest
of the
economy for them to be created.

As they should. "more taxes than most of us" IS their fair share.

Well that's a whole different issue, it's irresponsible giving is what it
is. In
a way it is encouraging corruption and graft and supporting criminals is
worse than not donating anything.

Ted

 

Nothing. But you said "Those at the top already pay more than their fair
share of taxes"
and that is absolute crap. The fair share of those at the top IS to pay a
higher rate
than the rest of us.

What are you talking about, income tax was started by Abe Lincoln during the
Civil War.

Exactly. The problem today is that many of the super rich do not feel that
they ever have excess money, no matter how much money they make.
You are proving my point, here.

That happened in the 1950s and clearly it was completely stupid. That is
why they stopped doing it.

Marginal tax rate today is about 33%

Same difference. They give millions away to charities that help out the
poor, if those
charities didn't exist the government would have to step in and pick up the
tab, thus
raising taxes.

The problem today is not in overtaxing the rich, far, far from it. The
problem today
at least in the US is that the federal government wastes billions on stupid
things - like continuing
the Iraq war long after we were done in there and should have left - and the
local
state governments waste millions on stupid things - like paying off
drunkards and such that have claimed
stress-related disability and got fired for it - that everyone, rich and
poor alike, is disgusted
with sending the government any more money. As a result we support these
tax revolutions
and such where the goal is indiscriminate and illogical tax cutting, which
makes things in
government work even worse and drives the few good people left in government
service
out of it, which makes the whole system even more awful, and thus just feeds
the drive
for cutting even more taxes.

None of the tax cutters spawned by the Reagan revolution has ever once
proposed
any viable alternative to government. These people's hope is that somehow
if we starve
government of tax money and thus force it to shrink, that it will get better
on it's own.
Their answer to government waste is to just stop funding government - it is
not to go in
and find who the wasters are and hang them from the nearest sour apple tree.
But of
course, if the money-wastng branch of the government happens to be the same
branch that
has voted itself in charge of enforcing religion and morals on the
population, then we
never cut their budget.

Ted

 

Which is a blink of an eye in historical terms.

Birthrate may have dropped in the US but population increase has not.

I used steel as an example as that is easily understood. You apparently
missed the point about entropy.

It isn't that the steel has been depeleted, it is that it's in a far less
easy to
extract form. There are other resources that are much scarcer that are
much more esoteric that will run out long before iron does.

That's why it worked for 12 million years. What did you think humans
were doing before the emergence of tool-use. Or are you one of the
Adam and Eve people?

Ted

 

It didnt 'work' for 12 million years! It HUNG ON for 12 million years!

Until man EVOLVED, if you want to look at it that way.

Your point is either escaping me or wraps back on itself.

I cant figger out whether you advocate a return to primitivism or what!

MY POINT is that man has learned to overcome the obstacles put before
him; which the 'hunter-gatherer could not.. Thus the extinctions of
whole 'communities' to use the modern term for Neanderthals et al.

 

There's a LOT of truth to this post. I know it's hard for GM supporters to
accept, but the company is in VERY serious trouble.

 

You are entitled to you own opinion however currently the top 5% of the
taxpayers in the US pay nearly 50% of ALL the taxes paid to the federal
treasury. That is indeed at a higher RATE and MORE than a fair share of
the cost of running the wasteful inefficient federal government you
referenced. Personally I pay more in federal income taxes annually today,
than the total amount of my income for the first 40 years of my working
life.

mike hunt

 

Just for the record steel does not come out of the ground. Steel is an
amalgam and is the mostly recycled man made product. At the current rate
of consumption the world has enough iron ore deposits to last a thousand
years.

mike hunt



"Ted Mittelstaedt" <of the car. >> >

Every time we manufacture another car we lose a bit of the steel

 

hmm i know someone who makes parts in this country namely in howell michigan for
toyleta and makes good money with full benies
and that is a outsourced part from toyleta , then i know a few few poeple that
work for honda and make dam good money

 

That may be your opinon but the fact is NO foreign manufacter that assembes
vehicles or makes parts for their vehicles in the SU that offers wages or
benifite anywere near equal to those offered by domestic manufactes that
build vehicle and parts for domestic manufactures, peroid. Domestic
manufactures also pay federal corpertate income taxes on the profit they
earn in the US, Japanese coperations do not

mike hunt

 

I am not advocating a return to primitivism. With the current human
population that
would be impossible anyway since the Earth has long since passed the point
at
which primitivism could support the total human population.

What I am explaining that you seem to be missing is that the human specie
has a
problem when the systems that are setup which sustain it are not
self-regenerating.
These can be technical systems or even political systems.

Look at political systems for a second. A dictatorship is unsustainable as
a political
system because it depends on one man, and gains legitimacy through force -
which
means that any one of the population it is governing can morally kill the
dictator and
take his place. That makes for constant violent power struggles which spawn
civil
wars. Sustained technological growth, or civilization as we know it cannot
exist in
this environment since there's no possible way to do any kind of long term
investment
projects or anything large like that. China for example is constructing the
world's
largest dam on the Yangtee river - well in a country in which civil war is a
constant
that could not happen because that dam would be a military target, and if
war broke
out it would be destroyed and kill millions through flooding.

So another way of looking at it is that a dictatorship political system is
not
self-healing and self-regenerating.

Gettiing back to technology, quite obviously basing energy systems on oil is
not
self-regenerating. Basing them on nuclear is not self-regenerating unless
you are
only building breeder reactors (and in that case your going to have a hell
of an
arms problem with plutonium diversion) Basing them on something like wind
or
tides is self-regenerating because no matter how much energy we take out of
wind,
the sun is constantly fueling more wind movement.

Today we have an incredible number of systems, technological systems that
is,
which are not self-regenerating, and in fact quite a number of these are
going to
run out within a few centuries.

Our first priority should be to adjust these systems to extend their
expiration date,
as you will, and right after that our next priority should be to replace
them with
systems that are self-regenerating. This can be done with innovation, but
it also
can be done by reducing consumption. Population reduction is the quickest
way
to reduce consumption, that is why China does not allow more than 2 births
per
couple.

But you see, man really hasn't learned to overcome obstacles put before him.
One of these obstacles is man has not learned to wean himself off things
like
oil as an energy source, which we know is finite.

If you could tomorrow put together an inexhaustable energy system, or an
inexhaustable food production system, or an inexhaustable whatever
production
system, then you could be perfectly fine arguing for unlimited population
growth.

But we don't have that now, and as such, an excellent first step would be to
do what is necessary to make world population growth flatten out. An
excellent
second step would be to adjust global systems so that all of the people we
DO
have on the planet get a decent education, so that they can be working on
building
the self-regenerating systems that we need.

Ted

 

So what? All that indicates is that 5% of the US taxpayers are making such
an unbelievable amount of money that they could spend the rest of their
lives buying everything they set their eyes on all day long and still die
richer than you can imagine.

Bullshit. Yearly income of $326,451 and above, the tax bracket is 35%
That is only about 10% more than most of the middle class pay. And
it does not mean, contrary to what you are implying, that rich are anywhere
near turning over half their income to the government.

Wrong. The wasteful inefficient federal government's operations
are what allow the superrich to make so much money that they are funding
50% of the government.

You can always quit complaining and go back to what you were making before,
then pay less taxes. Would that make you happy?

Believe me lots of people out there would be happy to trade places with you
and would be perfectly glad to pay the government even more in taxes than
you
do.

I really feel sorry for you, Mike. Your attitude is exactly that of the
nouveau riche kind of person that any of the old Eastern money would
be disgusted with. You wouldn't last more than 15 minutes at dinner with
any of them before they would have you tossed out on the street. Quite
obviously all your money has done nothing to make you feel any better about
yourself or anyone else.

Ted

 

Almost none of the transplant factories are unionionized, and although
they pay good wages for their regions they pay far less than do GM, Ford
or Chrysler.

One of the bad side effects of the high UAW wages is that US companies
are doubly motivated to build factories outside of the US/Canada where
they are away from the UAW. Ditto for the parts suppliers.

The UAW has over time become part of the problem.

John

 

That isn't true Mike. I've toured the Nummi plant in Fremont
California, and they do the vast majority of metal stamping on site,
thus the unibody itself is completely made in the US. Most of their
engines come from Toyota factories in the eastern US. Tires, batteries,
wheels, windows, interiors, etc are also sourced from US factories.

The Japanese automobile makers are increasing the US content of their US
vehicles all the time. There is no cost advantage to them in sourcing
components from their home factories in Japan.

John

 

I'll waste not more time trying to enlighten you. As with most of things
about which you chose to comment you obviously have little or no knowledge
of that which you are addressing, merely stating a convolute opinion.


mike hunt

 

Once again what you seem to believe to be true, is not The plant which you
reference is the exception.. The reason is the GM/UAW contract requires US
parts content to be at least 75%. All of Toyotas other plants are operated
far differently. In case you haven't noticed Toyota has decreased the
amount of US parts used in the Camry, and others merely assembled in the US,
to below 40%. The first number of the VIN is no longer a '4,' it is now a
'5,' and Toyota has changed its advertising to include the statement
'assembled in the US of world sourced parts.'


mike hunt

 

Comparing US and Euro unemployment figures is totally meaningless. The Euro
numbers reflect the number of people actually unemployed, while the US
numbers only count those still actively seeking employment. Those who have
given up are not counted, so the actual US vs. Euro unemployment is much
closer than the official number indicate.

 

u need to read at some uaw websites and get the real facts
gm has not paid taxes in a few years since it always operates in the red but
the upper management gets millions in base pay and stock options while they
continue to send work of of our countryn and they wages you site do not exist
anymore so the 18 a hour honda pays is good

 

did you recently read where the delphi's mister miller is forgoing his 1.5 million a
year base pay for the next year! and u blame the uaw i think not add the sum to the 32
top exucs they fired and that adds up the the debt the company owes!