VoyForums
[ Show ]
Support VoyForums
[ Shrink ]
VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Main index ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, [9], 10 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 19:15:59 09/14/08 Sun
Author: Bill
Author Host/IP: 71.250.66.151
Subject: Re: $50 billion handout....Umm Fred ..........
In reply to: Fred 's message, "$50 billion handout...." on 16:53:32 09/14/08 Sun

The japanese have been subsidizing their auto companies for decades. They adopted a policy way back in the seventies or eighties of trying to keep as many Japanese workers on the job as possible and began subsidizing the auto companies as one way of doing that. they were building cars they had no way of selling at a profit and dumping them into the american market below cost to get rid of the product over supply. The Japanese government has been keeping their auto companies afloat for a long time now and superior product or any of the other claims were not the reason that they are as successful as they are and have spread worldwide anywhere as much as government backing. If they are developing such cars out of their profits it is because they were subsidized that they were making those profits in the first place.
By contrast the US companies pay outrageous taxes compared to other countries , have more regulations and requirements burdened on them and are constabtly barraged by government sticking their noses into the process demanding they do this or that for some non business reason.

By the way some of those US companies have been working on alternative power for decades trying to find the right ways to go.
Electric is not the answer unless you get very low cost generation and hybrids are at best a stopgap not a solution. Nat gas might be an answer at least for a longer time frame than electric cars, but I think it will take a lot of real thinking and development to come up with the real solution and so far nobody has done more than scratch the surface in that area.

Don't know what I think about government subsidies for auto makers but without them the home producers would most liely go belly up and we would all be buying cars and trucks from outside of the country or from domestic plants run by companies from elsewhere and the cost would NO doubt go up up and away as a result.

Now if they put a lot of money into redeveloping the public transport system and getting us off of dependency on the private auto that might be something to go for and could be done though it would be on a massive scale compared to all other countries that went that way.
They never should have killed the domestic rail transportation system in this country it was once the best in the world.

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]
Forum timezone: GMT-5
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.