Maybe they should give 1000 shares of their stock if you buy a car.
People love to gamble with stocks and this way you could make big bucks, if not at least you get to keep the car.
It is like a rebate that pays dividends. 
Except in a âbailoutâ situation, the receiver/government wouldnât allow dividends - or even honor the previous shares sold (previously issued stock becomes worthless).
i think we need local ninja militias to go to every corporate office or big business in the area every business day and beat up the overpaid CEOâs/management till they revamp their pay scales. nothing like roadside justice to make things right!
Brian
as long as they beat up over paid UAW members as well
Bring em on!!!:walter:
I heard someone suggest about being able to write off the tax and depreciation on a new Gm, Ford, or Chrysler for 2-3 years as an incentive.
sure ill agree to that. 
well at least the decision makers.
Brian
Good artice by Ben Stein on yahoo finance ~ the bail out. Makes some good points.
Posted on Tuesday, December 9, 2008, 12:00AM
Usually this column is about finance. It usually is an attempt to help the reader make money and have a more comfortable life. I am well aware that I have made a lot of mistakes and that in the short run many of my suggestions have turned out badly. Believe me, I am sorry. I still believe that in the long run the investment ideas will do well, but I am terribly sad that peopleâs hopes have been disappointed in the short run. My best guess is that we are in a panic of sellers and market manipulators and that we will recover within a few years, but I base this on history. We may have moved into a new phase where history is irrelevant. I would be surprised if that were so, since itâs never been true before, but one never knows.
However, today, letâs talk about the American auto companies. They need a bailout from us taxpayers, and they have to get it yesterday. Hereâs why
First, we are on thin ice economically. To allow our largest heavy industrial component to fail at this delicate moment is suicidal. To put a couple of million more Americans into unemployment is just not sensible. Mr. Barack Obama is talking about public works projects to employ hundreds of thousands of Americans -bridge building, school building, airport building. These projects take time to start, disrupt local community life, and are famously wasteful.
Why not be smart about it and NOT LET AMERICANS GET UNEMPLOYED IN THE FIRST PLACE? (Please pardon the shouting.) There are millions of Americans already hard at work making great American made cars and trucks. Why not keep them on the job? Wouldnât that be smarter than allowing the whole upper Midwest to fall into oblivion and then rescue it over a fifty year period?
Second, I get sick when I hear about how this or that professor says we cannot have bailouts in a free market. Really? How about the bailouts the professors get because gifts to colleges are tax free? How about the bailout they get because if they have to teach six hours a week they feel overwhelmed, while the guy on the line in Dearborn works a grueling forty and doesnât whine about it?
Somehow, we can give bailouts to investment banks where the top dogs make hundreds of millions a year for running the company into the ditch and wrecking the whole credit picture in America. Somehow we can have bailouts for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose bosses were trading on the credit of the taxpayers to make themselves rich while pumping up a serious housing bubble.
Amazingly, we can have whole fleets of C-130âs fly to remote areas of Iraq and Afghanistan with pallets of hundred dollar bills piled from floor to ceiling. Then we can pass them out to warlords who make tea for our soldiers one hour and blow their guts out the next. We can send CIA operatives into Somalia and give millions, maybe hundreds of millions, to warlords to fight other killers.
But we cannot find it in our hearts to save our fellow Americans in Ohio and Michigan and Indiana who make the cars and trucks that about half of us buy? We can send billions to Germany and Japan to bail them out after they bombed us and killed our POWs and killed six million Jews. But we cannot help the children and grandchildren of the men and women who fought our war and made us the arsenal of democracy?
Something is very wrong here.
And please donât tell me how GM and Ford and Chrysler have made bad cars that people donât want. I drive only American cars, only GM cars actually, and they are the best, coolest cars I have ever driven: my 1962 Red Corvette, my mighty Cadillacs whose potent engines and super brakes have saved my life many times on the freeway. Yes, the cool people in DC and New York donât drive American cars. But a lot of other good people do and we love them. And my Cadillac dealer down here in the desert, Jessup Motors, gives me a lot better service than my Mercedes, Porsche, BMW, Jaguar, or Acura dealers ever did. I would trust my life to Detroit iron any time.
And why are we so angry at the car companiesâ executives? They get miserable pay by Wall Street standards and have much harder jobs. Why are we so angry at the unions? They negotiated their deals in good faith. Itâs not their fault that roller coaster gasoline prices messed up their world. They are our brothers and sisters. They fight our wars. They maintain our middle class lives. Maybe they get paid a lot, but they have been giving back for years. When will it ever be enough? And what about the retirees? They get the benefits they were promised. If those can be taken away, then whose benefits are safe? And do you think it will be cheaper if the government takes on those costs directly?
Letâs stop the Depression before it starts. Letâs show some fairness and good faith to our own. Letâs bail out the Big Three, help them slim down, shape up, and keep making great cars and trucks. The Big Three are us and if we cannot help ourselves, who can we help?
Pretty much echoes my sentiments in my OP.
I really like ben stein. Especially for a conservative, he makes some intellectually sound points without sounding like too much of an egghead. bueller?
I accidentally the auto industry
The whole thing
If the CEOâs would have said this they would have gotten $500 Billion on the spot!
Ben Steins article is really interesting. I never really thought about it like that. The amount of money that we spend abroad outweighs the bailout amount in a staggering way. Heâs right. Perhaps America should start thinking about itself for a while, and leave the rest of the world alone until we can stand on our own two feet.
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008811230371
MITCH ALBOM
If I had the floor at the auto rescue talks
BY MITCH ALBOM ⢠FREE PRESS COLUMNIST ⢠November 23, 2008
OK. Itâs a fantasy. But if I had five minutes in front of Congress last week, hereâs what I wouldâve said:
Good morning. First of all, before you ask, I flew commercial. Northwest Airlines. Had a bag of peanuts for breakfast. Of course, thatâs Northwest, which just merged with Delta, a merger you, our government, approved â and one which, inevitably, will lead to big bonuses for their executives and higher costs for us. You seem to be OK with that kind of business.
Which makes me wonder why youâre so against our kind of business? The kind we do in Detroit. The kind that gets your fingernails dirty. The kind where people use hammers and drills, not keystrokes. The kind where you get paid for making something, not moving money around a board and skimming a percentage.
Youâve already given hundreds of billions to banking and finance companies â and hardly demanded anything. Yet you balk at the very idea of giving $25 billion to the Detroit Three. Heck, you shoveled that exact amount to Citigroup â $25 billion â just weeks ago, and that place is about to crumble anyhow.
Does the word âhypocrisyâ ring a bell?
Protecting the home turf?
Sen. Shelby. Yes. You. From Alabama. Youâve been awfully vocal. You called the Detroit Threeâs leaders âfailures.â You said loans to them would be âwasted money.â You said they should go bankrupt and âlet the market work.â
Why werenât you equally vocal when your state handed out hundreds of millions in tax breaks to Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, Honda and others to open plants there? Why not âlet the market workâ? Or is it better for Alabama if the Detroit Three fold so that the foreign companies â in your state â can produce more?
Way to think of the nation first, senator.
And you, Sen. Kyl of Arizona. You told reporters: âThereâs no reason to throw money at a problem thatâs not going to get solved.â
Thatâs funny, coming from such an avid supporter of the Iraq war. Youâve been gung ho on that for years. So how could you just sit there when, according to the New York Times, an Iraqi former chief investigator told Congress that $13 billion in U.S. reconstruction funds âhad been lost to fraud, embezzlement, theft and wasteâ by the Iraqi government?
Thatâs 13 billion, senator. More than half of what the auto industry is asking for. Thirteen billion? Gone? Wasted?
Where was your âthrowing money at a problem thatâs not going to get solvedâ speech then?
Watching over the bankers?
And the rest of you lawmakers. The ones who insist the auto companies show you a plan before you help them. Youâve already handed over $150 billion of our tax money to AIG. How come you never demanded a plan from it? How come when AIG blew through its first $85 billion, you quickly gave it more? The car companies may be losing money, but they can explain it: Theyâre paying workers too much and selling cars for too little.
AIG lost hundred of billions in credit default swaps â which no one can explain and which make nothing, produce nothing, employ no one and are essentially bets on failure.
And you donât demand a paragraph from it?
Look. Nobody is saying the auto business is healthy. Its unions need to adjust more. Its models and dealerships need to shrink. Its top executives have to downsize their own importance.
But this is a business that has been around for more than a century. And some of its problems are because of that, because people get used to certain wages, manufacturers get used to certain business models. Itâs easy to point to foreign carmakers with tax breaks, no union costs and a cleaner slate â not to mention help from their home countries â and say âbe more like them.â
But if you let us die, you let our national spine collapse. America canât be a country of lawyers and financial analysts. We have to manufacture. We need that infrastructure. We need those jobs. We need that security. Have you forgotten who built equipment during the world wars?
Besides, letâs be honest. When it comes to blowing budgets, being grossly inefficient and wallowing in debt, whoâs better than Congress?
So who are you to lecture anyone on how to run a business?
Ask fair questions. Demand accountability. But knock it off with the holier than thou crap, OK? You got us into this mess with greed, a bad Fed policy and too little regulation. Donât kick our tires to make yourselves look better.
Contact MITCH ALBOM at 313-223-4581 or malbom@freepress.com. Catch âThe Mitch Albom Showâ 5-7 p.m. weekdays on WJR-AM (760).
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081210/ap_on_bi_ge/autos_whacking_the_taxpayers
WASHINGTON â The U.S. auto industryâs problems will cost taxpayers plenty whether or not the government helps Detroit.
Just walking away and letting the struggling Big Three automakers go under would drain government coffers by about as much as the $15 billion bridge loan that lawmakers are preparing, and perhaps much more, according to outside analysts. The costs would come from lower tax collections by the federal, state and local governments and the payment of extra unemployment, pension and other benefits to unemployed or retired auto workers.
Thereâs sharp disagreement among outside experts about exactly what an auto industry failure would look like and how much it would cost taxpayers. But whatâs clear is that while no one knows how much government aid the Big Three will ultimately need, inaction would also be expensive, assuming automobile production drops and more workers lose their jobs.
âItâs possible to push arguments like this too far, but there is still a net costâ to government without taking action, said Lou Crandall, chief economist for the bond market research firm Wrightson ICAP in Jersey City, N.J. âThe question is whether the social objective youâre pursuing is worth that net cost.â
The Center for Automotive Research, a non-profit organization in Ann Arbor, Mich., estimates that if Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC completely stopped making cars next year but returned to 50 percent production levels in 2010 and 2011, it would still wipe out nearly 2.5 million jobs next year.
The center, which gets a small portion of its budget from auto companies, says 239,000 of those jobs would come from the Big Three, 795,000 from their suppliers, and 1.4 million from other jobs created by the spending of auto workers and suppliersâ employees. The number of lost jobs would decline to 1 million by 2011 as the Detroit companies resume work, foreign automakers in the U.S. expand their production, and some laid-off workers find other jobs.
Overall, that lost employment would cost government at all levels $50 billion next year and $108 billion over the next three years, the center estimates, with Washington bearing most of that cost. Almost a quarter of the money would be for unemployment, welfare, health care and other costs government would have to carry, while the rest would come from lost collections of income taxes and payroll taxes that support Social Security.
In a more severe scenario in which the Big Three halted all U.S. operations completely, the three-year cost to taxpayers would be $156 billion in lost tax revenue and higher spending, the center says.
âWithout questionâ it would cost the government less to give the Big Three a loan than to watch them curtail production, said Sean McAlinden, the research centerâs vice president for research. âThatâs better than taking this huge tax and transfer payment hit.â
The conservative Heritage Foundation, however, says such projections are far too dismal.
William Beach, a senior fellow in economics at the thinktank, says it is likelier that the Detroit automakers would declare bankruptcy but continue reduced operations as they try to re-emerge as leaner but stronger companies. During this lull, foreign auto companies in the U.S. would see their sales increase and would hire additional workers, cushioning much of the blow to government budgets.
The result: 453,000 lost jobs in the first year from the Big Three, their suppliers and spin-off jobs, Heritage estimates. Beach said this would mean a 2009 cost to federal taxpayers of just over $13 billion: $12.7 billion in tax collections and nearly $600 million for unemployment insurance, food stamps and other expenditures.
âThe impact is significant but not large,â Beach said. âThe government has well-developed programs to handle things like this.â
A pair of Michigan consulting firms say an automaker bankruptcy would be four times more expensive to taxpayers than a government bailout that allows the companies to restructure.
If two of the Big Three declare bankruptcy and are forced to liquidate, federal and state taxpayers would lose $66 billion in the first two years alone, according to a study by Anderson Economic Group of East Lansing, Mich., and BBK, a business advisory firm in Southfield, Mich. That scenario â which envisions the loss of 1.8 million jobs â includes costs of $20 billion in lost federal income taxes, $21 billion in payroll taxes, $6 billion in state income and property taxes, and $5 billion in unemployment benefits.
A $30 billion loan in which half is repaid and the government gets a stake in the companies would cost $16 billion, with far less in lost revenue and higher spending to support unemployed workers, the firms predicted.
Warily eyeing the auto industryâs problems is the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., the federal corporation that insures the defined-benefit pensions of 44 million American workers, including autoworkers.
Even without a failure in Detroit, the PBGC has about $11 billion more in liabilities than it holds in assets. In an interview, Director Charles E.F. Millard said the red ink could grow, depending on what happens to the automakersâ pension funds.
âItâs possible that in a bankruptcy scenario, the deficit of the PBGC could more than double,â he said. âItâs also possible the PBGC would not be affected.â The PBGC receives no taxpayer funds and is financed by fees on the companies it insures and other sources. A dramatic worsening of the corporationâs finances, along with growing numbers of people drawing pensions from it, might force lawmakers to consider taxpayer assistance.
that is all.
prepare to see the DJIA ~5000âŚ
And gold at $5000
well at least something good would come out of it for me
You can thank the Republicans for todayâs monster losses.
work should be fun today.
I will watch for jumpers.
Actually, thank the UAW. The sticking point on the bailout was them refusing to set a date for parity pay. The government wants the US union auto workers paid the same as the non-union US auto workers. Itâs a $3-$4/hr difference and the union refuses to do it.
So Iâm glad they canned the bailout. Reap what you sew UAW. You got GM in this mess and it looks like youâre willing to keep them there.