Global economy experts preach – NO BAILOUTS, NO HANDOUTS, NO SUBSIDIES.
In a global marketplace each country will find appropriate industries in which they’ll thrive, and they will adapt to survive.
However, usually politics, and lobbyists become invovled, and often the pain and hardship experienced by sizable communities during the shakeout cause short term remedies, which perpetuate the imbalances.
The US auto industry has NOT been able to compete on features, price, or styling for decades, and outside of the US you see very few American cars – apart from the notalgic classics.
For the US – with citizens with a high hourly wage (on a global basis) – there has to be a general trend away from manufacturing (which can always be done cheaper somewhere else) into knowledge and leadership enterprises where the labour component is only a small peice of the overall price.
That’s the global economic view, but unfortunately, that leaves a large local workforce that is either unskilled, or only skilled in obsolecent technologies, and at a local level its PEOPLE that feel the pain of a changing economy.
A one-off bailout would only be appropraite if the government somehow beleived that the US auto industry could then retool itself and create cars that people wanted at affordable prices at global level.
A prolonged subsidy would only be appropriate if this industry was considered a “way of life’ that the US wanted to continue.
A handout ? Well isn’t that called the unemployment benefit anyway ? It’ll be coming one way or the other.