We need to hit bottom before rebuilding

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Boy, this economy is on everyone’s minds.
At press time the auto bail out had been nudged into a ditch by the powers in Washington, and of course the various lunatic financial markets responded poorly.
I don’t know that I care.
I mean the thing is tanking, right? Why prolong the pain?
Just let it tank, find a bottom, and begin the building again. I mean, the “big picture” economy is very different from the economy of the average American. We will survive, even if it is a terrible struggle.
Yes, this is going to suck, but we need to find a bottom before we can head up.
I don’t think any of the policy makers or financial power brokers really believe that, and it troubles me.
It is painfully clear that the government is going to have to offer money hand over fist to someone in order to get this thing going again, but I’m still wondering why it is going from the top down.
As everyone has already said, these are the same idiots who got us here. Why are we going to give them billions now?
Some politicians don’t want to jeopardize the workers in the automobile manufacturing factories, the parts factories, and every other support and after-market industry that will be rippled right out of existence should the car industry fail.
I think that concern is far too late in coming.
The problem is the auto industry’s business model has slowly but surely been phased out through the years.
I have a new word of the day, or maybe words of the day — post-industrial economy.
I learned this word in a basic high school economics course in the waning years of the Reagan presidency.
I seriously doubt my teacher in 1988 was the only one in the entire United States to discuss the topic with juniors in high school. Yet, as I see it, we have done nothing to truly protect ourselves from the reality that for the most part manufacturing jobs are going to where there are no unions, wages are minuscule, and the word retirement is not even in the local vocabulary.
It’s not that I take joy in that fact, but it is nonetheless a fact.
We have driven capitalism everywhere, after all. I hope someone realized that the developing world wouldn’t just send us the cheap raw materials forever with-out figuring out they have cheap labor too.
On the home front, though, I feel for the workers and their families, and I think they will need help from the government to get them through this tough time.
I don’t, however, think sound policy is giving money to an industry that has been getting its tail kicked by overseas manufacturers for 20 years, all the while throwing billions of dollars out the window trying to continue with a business model that came about at the turn of the last century.
The cold hard truth is that we don’t need three major automobile companies in this country anymore.
The workers need to figure out something else to do.
It isn’t pleasant, but I hear bridges are going to be a hot deal for awhile. And if our last recession has anything to say about our current one, dams will be big business, too.
My Christmas wish is that policy makers will turn their focus to building back up the American worker and the families of working people, not giving bridge loans and bailout packages to the shortsighted financial and manufacturing morons who helped us into this position in the first place.