The Wizzle is back, just in time for the whole darn economy to fall apart

Hey there, it's me - the mostly absent, cautiously optimistic, baby-making, tree-hugging, flip-flopping resident bleeding heart! The newest, smallest member of my household is 8 weeks old and I'm starting to come up for air periodically, so I thought I'd write an actual post of my own - you know, instead of just lying in wait and then picking apart other people's deepest thoughts...

...although my own preference is to do less talking and more listening. It really has been enlightening and a pleasure to read everyone's perspectives on the issues we've discussed. I surely get tired sometimes of hearing my own voice talking itself in circles in my head!

I've been thinking a lot about the economy and all, as I try to calculate how many children we can reasonably stuff into our little house (since it appears that selling it for a profit is, shall we say, a pipe dream at best). While I'm calculating that, I'm studiously avoiding checking the value of our 401K and praying that BBD's job will continue to be secure. I'm sure we're all pretty much in the same boat there.

So my family's future isn't looking too bad at the moment - but I'm way out here in the Wild West. Many of the good people of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and the rest of the Midwest are waiting this week for the other shoe to drop. The very foundations of their livelihood, the Big 3 automakers, have come groveling to the government to save them from bankruptcy. People aren't buying their products, and they're bowed low with the weight of some of the most generous pension and health care plans in the known world. Millions of people depend on Chrysler, GM, and Ford for their jobs in one way or another, and the way I see it, those people will get screwed now or they will get screwed later. The question is, are the rest of us going to go down with them?

Mitt Romney wrote an editorial for the New York Times this week that really summed up the situation very well, in my opinion. Basically, if the Big 3 bailout is shot down, the companies will declare bankruptcy. They will be able to start over and restructure the areas that are most problematic: the management that has come up a day late and a dollar short in anticipating the changing needs and expectations of the American buying public, the adversarial relationship between the management and the workers' union, the gross excesses of executive compensations and benefits that are in no way tied to company performance or the compensations of the "regular" employees, and the total lack of investment in research and development - the pioneering spirit that this country - and the American auto industry - was built on! We pioneered high-quality/low-cost cars, for crying out loud, and now practically everyone in the world makes them better and more efficiently than we do.

Bankruptcy is going to hurt the employees of the Big 3, and all the employees of other businesses in their wake. And anyone who knows me, knows that my heart breaks for those people who have given their lives to these companies, trying to support their families and just keep their heads above water. It's an honest living. But I just don't see any way around the restructuring that needs to happen. For the Big 3 to regain their competitive footing, they're going to need to address these problems sooner or later. So people's pensions are going to be smaller, their pay will be cut, their benefits reduced, because that's the only way for American car companies to keep making cars. The difference is, it can happen in 5 or 10 years anyway and the rest of the taxpayers can foot the bill, or it can happen now and we can begin the extraordinarily painful rebuilding process sooner.

Now, as I've been typing this my mind has wandered, as it so often does, and I find myself thinking: building cars that all of us drive is an honest living. We manufacture so little in this country anymore, yet our know-how and infrastructure for automobile manufacturing is so good that even many "foreign" cars are now made right here in the USA. I think we should cling to that and do it the very best that we can.

BUT.

Henry Ford built his extremely successful operation on mass production of of inexpensive cars - coupled with high wages for his employees. It was one of the critical, fundamental tenets of his business model. We are now at the point where the Big 3 can no longer afford to offer that to their workers, because Honda, Toyota, and others pay their workers less and yet churn out better products. But why is that? People used to buy cars and houses and furniture and groceries from their local vendor or producer of said items. They used to go to their physiciand and pay in cash for their treatment. They weren't all wealthy, but they didn't have to buy everything at Wal-Mart just to have enough money left over to keep the lights on.

What has changed in the world? Is there just so much more information, so much "access", that we are aware of all the "stuff" out there in the market and we perceive it to be necessary for a middle-class life? Is it globalization? Is it overpopulation? Is it the ever-growing chasm between the Haves and Have Nots? Why do we run around like chickens with our heads cut off, working more hours, spending more money, getting more stuff, but not any happier? Why can we "not afford" to shop at ethical businesses, to buy high-quality products that don't fall apart after 5 uses and sit in a landfill, to pay our honest workers a living wage? Is our income relative to our needs so much less than it used to be? Or has our perception of what we need, or deserve, grown faster than we can support it?

These are not rhetorical questions, any of them. I really don't know, and I'd really like to. I wonder if there's any hope for a society where you can only live comfortably by entering a few select professions. Teachers, auto workers, construction workers and garbage collectors provide services we need, and I would venture that they provide a great deal more benefit to us than all these executive-investment-banker-speculator number crunchers who circle over us, betting on our misfortunes, shuffling imaginary money around and profiting from the people who actually get their hands dirty and WORK.

What does the future hold? Does GM restructure its benefits, cutting back so far in the name of competition that another blue collar career becomes one that cannot support a family? Or does the new management find a way to keep Henry Ford's dream alive in a new century, a new society, and a whole new world?