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By declaring bankruptcy under such friendly terms (basically ditching their old company and starting a new one), GM is escaping $500M in cleanup of polluted, abandoned sites. Thus leaving us, the taxpayers, with the bill.
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This is why "Cash for Clunkers" requires that the cars be junked. The notion of allowing poor families to acquire them might seem noble (and I'd argue that it's actually a pretty lousy proposal—somebody who can't afford a car probably can't afford to maintain one), but it would really just set up the program to fail.
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The laws that government sex offenders—and, indeed, the laws that get somebody classified as such—are increasingly illogical and unjust. Can't we lock up the truly dangerous and while leaving alone the truly innocent?
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The folks showing up for these health care town hall meets are the fringiest of the right-wing—Birthers every one of them, I suspect—who are apparently there only to shout as loudly as they can.
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Shane MacGowan has teeth! There goes his cred.
Comments are closed.
I’m fiercely independent and refuse to generalize a crowd as “Birthers” as the linked article does.
That being said, I was also ashamed of the crowd at Tom Perriello’s meeting in Danville.
There was quite a bit of chatter around the office yesterday about the GM facilities. 1) How can we get this work and 2) how is it feasible for GM to just unload liability like that? Someone had to have let something slide through. Environmental clean-up becomes a lien just like any other debt in bankruptcy.
I’ve worked on numerous contaminated sites where the owner/operator went bankrupt and the state and feds kept going after them. Rarely does a company just “go away”. There is always someone out there generating more money. And in GM’s case, well, it’s very clear that GM will still exist. More than likely the Feds will go after GM for many, many years and lawyers will make huge profits. If GM would just do the right thing and start setting aside cash and planning to clean the sites, things would work out much cheaper for all sides. But that won’t happen.
I cannot agree with this idea that someone who cannot afford to buy a new car cannot manage to maintain one. I have never purchased a new car and all but 2 of the cars I have ever owned were bought for less than $4,500. I once bought a pickup for $150 and drove it for about 4 years. Sure, it broke sometimes. And when it did I often read up on what was wrong with it, ordered used parts and fixed it myself. I used that truck to drive to work for a while. I used it to haul building material from Lowes to fix up a run-down house that I was then able to sell for a profit. The idea that I would have been better off without having had the truck at all is just wrong. It enabled all sorts of economic activity on my part that produced a net profit.
‘Cash for clunkers’ takes perfectly good cars and wastes them. The whole program is so stupid on so many levels that its hard to even know where to begin.
I didn’t say a “new” car. I said a car. This is a program that proposes to give away “clunkers”—old cars that do not run well—to people who cannot afford to buy old cars that do not run well. That seems like precisely the sort of program that conservatives love to accuse liberals of running—a well-intentioned program of giveaways that results in people winding up over their heads financially.
But why can’t non-profit organizations that currently accept donated cars get them (or some subset of the clunkers)? Not poor families, but organizations (church groups, etc.).
A stated, primary goal of this program is to get bad-gas-mileage vehicles off the road and replace them with vehicles that get good mileage. To allow them to remain on the road would run counter to its mission. (Plus, what’s keeping the church from selling it? Aren’t we just providing a significant incentive for non-profits to turn into dealers of gas hogs?) Germany carved out just such exceptions, and as a result, their program has turned into a debacle.