Too Broken to Save

I know I have commented a lot about this topic, and you may be getting tired of it, but I feel a lot of steam about this one, and I need to vent.

First - an announcement: YOUR GOVERNMENT WASTED BILLIONS OF DOLLARS ON THE AMERICAN AUTOMOBILE INDUSTRY. That is right, wasted. GM and Chrysler, both of whom got enormous bailouts from the American tax payers, have come back to Washington, begging for more money, since the first astronomical sum was not enough.

You know what they call this sort of thing in the banking/investment industry? Throwing good money after bad. It is not a good idea. Not good for you, not good for your family, not good for your business, and certainly not good for the United States of America. GM is a dying animal. Why are we feeding it more and more? Why on earth do the politicians who hold this country's purse strings believe it is a good idea to give even more money to a company that is obviously incapable of making sound financial decisions? I mean, sure: GM is in a tight spot, and that tight spot is very complicated. Unions, legacy costs, poor quality, bad reputation, blah, blah, blah. It seems to me that those exact same items make a good argument AGAINST investing tax payer dollars in GM.

Now I know this sounds heartless, and I know that hundreds of thousands of jobs are on the line, but GM has got to be allowed to die. It is never wise to let a cancer grow, and that is what GM has become. A cancer. A malignant, deadly tumor that has wrapped itself around several major organs of the American economy. The good news is, the economy can survive a GMectomy. It will be painful, but we can do it. This whole argument about companies being too big to fail is a false premise. I don't buy it. If they are too big to fail, then they wouldn't fail. So, since GM is failing, it is obviously not too big to fail. More correctly, it is too broken to rescue.

But instead, our wise and benevolent leaders in Washington don't see the trouble in feeding this tumor. They don't worry about the sickening effect on the nation of maintaining the existence of such a fundamentally unsound mega-corporation. They are too worried about keeping their jobs to make the hard decisions that need to be made. And then, to add ultimate insult to injury - they are spending some of the taxpayers billions on expensive lobbyists, who go to Washington in silk suits to lean on the legislature to keep their disease alive and thriving to sicken the economy for another few months.

Let's just do what every farmer worth his salt already understands to do: if one of your animals gets too sick to work, you have to shoot it. Otherwise, it eats the feed and drinks the water needed to keep the other animals strong and working. GM, you need to die. I will miss you. Especially the Corvette. But you have outlived your usefulness, and have now become a disease.