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Originally Posted by classicman
Would those jobs really be lost? How many other profitable automakers would have hired at least some of those workers? How many properly run companies would have bought or leased some of the facilities? There are as many unknowns there as there are knowns.
You cannot state that another 500,000 jobs would be lost and leave it at that. That too is as simplistic as my statement. Take into account the BILLIONS that company was given as a bailout and how much potential good that could have done as well as helped innovation in other areas. Not that anyone suggested that or it would have happened, but there were other options. Heck we still don't know if those jobs aren't going to be lost anyway. We may have just thrown away billions and just prolonged the problem. GM still sucks and so does Chrysler.
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Granted the 1/2 million job loss is an estimate, but probably a conservative estimate.
Who would hire those workers? Ford has increased profits by CUTTING expenses....not by significantly increasing production or output.
I guess they could move to Tennessee or Alabama and work for Honda or Toyota (even if both were also temporarily cutting US production). Of course, they couldnt sell their house in Detroit because of the depressed housing market.
And, then with the overall decreased output of a significantly smaller US auto industry...that means other companies/factories producing auto parts would produce less and as a result face layoffs....and more trickle down, dealerships closing across the country if you reduce the Big Three to the Big One.
As to those empty factories? What company could buy or lease without credit?
And much the same applies to TARP and the bank/financial institutions bail-out.
Without the TARP bank bail outs, credit dries up completely because remaining banks can only leverage so much credit.
What that would have meant is that tens of thousands of small businesses or businesses looking to start-up, just maintain existing operations, or expand would have lost access to existing and/or new lines of credit....to pay employees, buy inventory, etc.
More jobs lost.
IMO, the risk to the economy was too great to do nothing. Perhaps you were willing to take the risk (
would those jobs really be lost? .....who knows if those jobs wouldnt be lost anyway?), but I am sure glad we didnt. Its not that I like it, but rather that I thought it was necessary to stabilize what at the time was a very fragile economy.
There are no guarantees, but I still havent seen a better alternative. "Who knows" and "What if" certainly dont offer more or better assurances of economic stability and recovery.