Comment & Debate
Daniel J. Mitchell. “Commentary: Say no to the auto bailout”. CNN. 13 Nov. 2008 – “A bailout is a perverse transfer from poor taxpayers to rich taxpayers. America’s Founding Fathers surely never envisaged that the federal government would take money from one group of Americans and give it to another group. Yet much of the federal budget is devoted to redistribution programs.
Bailouts are a particularly bizarre form of redistribution, however, because the corporate bureaucrats at the Big Three are among the very richest Americans. The UAW bosses make extravagant salaries, as well, and even regular union workers make an average total compensation including benefits of approximately $70 per hour, far higher than the average American.
The government should not be in the business of giving unearned wealth to any group of citizens, but surely liberals and conservatives both can agree that politicians should not be taking money from middle class taxpayers and giving it to upper-middle class and rich taxpayers.”
Daniel J. Ikenson. “Don’t Bail Out the Big Three”. The American. 21 Nov. 2008 – The intellectual arguments against an auto industry bailout are well established. Taxpayers should never be forced to subsidize any company, let alone a poorly run company. Subsidizing the Big Three would be tantamount to subsidizing failure. That’s bad policy.
Corporate bailouts are clearly unfair to taxpayers, but they are also unfair to the successful firms in a particular industry, who are implicitly taxed and burdened when their competition is subsidized.
Bill Steigerwald. “Don’t Bail Out the Big Three”. Town Hall. 17 Nov. 2008 – Taxpayers, first of all, should never be on the hook to bail out private companies. They should definitely not be on the hook to bail out companies that have made terrible decisions time and again. And that’s what describes the Big Three: They’ve made bad decisions with respect to the products they make and they’ve made bad decisions with respect to their labor relations and the capitulations to the unions over the years that have really landed them with an uneconomic cost structure that makes it virtually impossible for them to compete going forward.