I think you know by now that I am strenuously opposed to all of the bailouts that the federal government has been throwing at the various flailing tentacles of the dying capitalist monster. While I can see some rationalization for injecting cash into the financial sector to revive liquidity, I see absolutely no good reason for the government to literaly flush money down the toilet by giving it to the “Big Three” car makers. The “too big to fail” argument only underscores how over-dependent our country is on automobiles and auto manufacturing and just how badly we need to let that industry die so that other forms of transportation can find their way to the market.
In his weekly strip for Salon, cartoonist Keith Knight points his sharp black marker at a much better idea than a government bailout: Let the oil companies, with their massive windfall profits, bail out the car manufacturers. After all, that’s a symbiotic relationship in the first place. Then, take all that money that would have gone into Detroit’s ripped pockets and invest in rail services, public transportation systems that decrease suburban dependence on automobiles, and anything else that helps to bring down the curtain once and for all on the Automotive Era.
“Jonco” from “Bits & Pieces” offers this alternative to having the government pay for all the bailouts:
1 . At Wal-Mart, Americans spend $36,000,000 every hour of every day.
2 . This works out to $20,928 profit. Every minute!
3. Wal-Mart will sell more from January 1 to St. Patrick’s Day (March 17th) than Target sells all year.
4. Wal-Mart is bigger than Home Depot + Kroger + Target + Sears + Costco + K-Mart combined.
5. Wal-Mart employs 1.6 million people and is the largest private employer. And most can’t speak English
6. Wal-Mart is the largest company in the history of the world.
7. Wal-Mart now sells more food than Kroger & Safeway combined, and keep in mind they did this in only 15 years.
8. During this same period, 31 supermarket chains sought bankruptcy (including Winn-Dixie).
9. Wal-Mart now sells more food than any other store in the world.
10. Wal-Mart has approx 3,900 stores in the USA of which 1,906 are SuperCenters; This is 1,000 more than it had 5 years ago.
11. This year, 7.2 billion different purchasing experiences will occur at a Wal-Mart store.
(Earth’s population is approximately 6.5 billion.)12. 90% of all Americans live within 15 miles of a Wal-Mart.
13. Let Wal Mart bail out Wall Street
Just to put the various bailouts into historical perspective, this blog has run the numbers and says that the total cost of all the bailouts, loans, and other federal interventions to date (including the proposed bailout for Citibank) comes to $4.6 trillion dollars. That is more money than we spent on the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Apollo Program, the Marshall Plan, the New Deal, the Louisiana Purchase, the Iraq Invasion, the Savings-and-Loan Bailout, AND the budget for NASA for the last 50 years COMBINED. Even the entire cost of the Second World War (in adjusted dollars) was “only” $3.6 trillion.
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