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Car Pools
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SUPPLY AND DEMAND
Re: Eric Peters’s Too Many Cars, Not Enough Market:

I don’t know what auto industry you are referring too. But not the one I recollect.

A) “Literally thousands of people and several weeks (if not months) of assembly process are involved in the creation of just one finished car.” Cars roll of assembly lines at about one every couple of minutes. From a bare frame to out of the factory is mere hours. Even adding supplier times, adds only a couple of weeks for components. You don’t reach the production totals you quote using the time spans you propose.

B) “For years now, the margins on cars have been extremely slim — and getting slimmer. Often as little as a few hundred bucks, net, per car.” Oh cry me a river. Go talk to any American Farmer. They would die for the auto industry’s margins. The farmer sweats over a crop all summer. The pair of $250k each combines that get used 2 weeks out of the year are being worked on. He prepares to harvest the crop with hope that the price will stay up so he can pay off the working capital loan to the bank.

The auto industry gets a try at making a profit with each car they sell to a customer. The farmer gets maybe 1 or 2 times a year for that opportunity. The farmers factory is at risk each time he goes into production. Not so the auto makers.

C) “Mercedes, BMWs, Audis and Volvos were curiosities one rarely saw outside of places like New York City and Los Angeles.” Wrong. The year I graduated, 1970, there were plenty of all 4 brands in our little podunk town of Bradenton, Florida. Yes they had to drive all the way to Tampa to buy them at that time. Volvo station wagons were quite popular as I recall.

My cusiosity is, why do you gloss over the obvious? Many of these imports have (or still are) receiving price supports from their home countries. For every Hyundai sold here means jobs made there not here.
John McGinnis
Arlington, Texas

I wondered when someone would have the good sense and knowledge to state the obvious. Mr. Peters is to be commended for articulating the facts in a rational and non-emotional way. I wish I could do the same but I worked for GMC during the ’70s, ’80s, and up until 1991. This overcapacity was no secret to anyone who did not have their heads in the sand. Socialist governments all over the world were either subsidizing or at least not handicapping their car companies with onerous regulations. In the U.S. when we in the auto industry would go down to D.C. advocating free market principles as well as criticizing environmental and market constraints that were killing our future, all we got from regulators and politicians was something like “Sure, sure we hear you (which they clearly did not), but what can you do to help us get re-elected?” Perhaps not as crass as those words but the meaning was clear.

The first Bush’s people were no different. Dumb ideas such as CAFE and restrictions on the use of coal, and bad labor policy doomed our auto industry just as sure as Al Gore must be the world’s goofiest and greediest man. Well,the inmates are in control of the government now so don’t expect any rational responses. Also don’t expect honest analysis from the corrupt, dishonest media.
Jack Wheatley


SELLOUT SPECTER
Re: Jeffrey Lord’s The Unseen Hand of Arlen Specter:

Arlen “the Weak” absolutely took the game completely out of the hands of the GOP before the first inning was started.

The Dems needed some GOP votes to sell this abomination and Arlen “The Weak” obliged as always. He tells us he wanted certain things out of the bill but never gave the bill a chance to be debated. He is not the brightest bulb in the Senate; any senator that would allow the feckless and just plain dumb Collins to be the lead negotiator is stupid.
Gene Deveney
Hoboken, New Jersey


OPIATE FOR THE LIBERALS

Re: Peter Ferrara’s Obama’s Failed and Tired Ideas From the Past:

Mr. Ferrara strikes the correct note in this awful music of liberal economics. Our economy once was based on the logical theory that if the people who work and create wealth keep the majority of their earnings they will spend some and reinvest some and the economy will prosper. This thesis is exemplified in the persons of Edison, Ford, Carnegie and their like. These men were economic dynamos. They used their energy to build and invent. That building and those inventions created employment which increased the size of the economic pie. So in that circumstance there is an increased amount of work for those who wish it.

Then came Liberalism. At the start of World War Two England was the wealthiest country in the world. It’s colonies even prospered relative to other undeveloped economies. By 1950 England’s apparently never-ending slide into economic irrelevance was well underway, and except for a decade after Mrs. Thatcher, it continues at an increasing pace.

Liberals believe that by taking an ever larger percentage of wealth from those who earn it and giving it to those who do nothing a nation can be made to prosper. This has never occurred anywhere or anytime in history. The change causes those who create wealth to husband more of that wealth in investments that benefit only them. This because intelligent people quickly learn that liberals view the creators of wealth only as ATMs. So to keep their live style they use more money to create more money relatively quickly to replace what is stolen by the government. This greatly slows the pace of economic expansion and the creation of more jobs (and thus wealth) for those who will work.

I would guess if one were able to thread their way through the bookkeeping chaos that is our government, one would find that somewhere near 80% of this government’s revenues, which are to the penny, stolen from those who work, are given to those who won’t. No strings. Just given to them. This vast amount of wealth that is given away every year has spawned huge industries, not subject to taxation. For one example the vast drug industry paid for by money stolen from workers and given to the shiftless. In a very few years the taxes from this money directed into the licit private industry would wipe out the national debt.

Liberal theory is just that which it pays for: drugs for the masses of the ignorant and lazy.
Jay Molyneaux
North Carolina


MICHICAN’T

Re: Theodore Roosevelt Malloch’s The Deeper Roots of Our Financial Crisis:

“Ever since we proclaimed that we should be free from fear, we have been afraid to be free”.

Being a realtor in America’s Chernobyl, Michigan, I have been forced to reassess my activities and plans endlessly as the radiation seeps through what’s left of economics here. Many of my former colleagues were all about pressuring clients to “close the sale”. Many of those colleagues are now gone. I found that folks are easier to close when they get what they want, at acceptable terms.

The virtuous have gone into hibernation, or left the state, looking for a better climate in which to honestly deal with other honest people. Washington, being in control of the currency, is not an honest broker, and the honest know it.
P. Aaron Jones
Michigan

I wish to thank you very much for writing a frank and truthful perspective on what ails our country/world and humanity. I have shared it with family, friends and colleagues. Warmest regards,
Iris James

RED ROBERT
Re: Ralph R. Reiland’s Isn’t It Reich?

It’s the very old argument of “the individual versus the crowd” that Reich makes. First off, he assumes his “high status” position as an “intellectual” who should be heard. Next, he grabs for a power position from which he gives forth his commands as one of the leaders.

God, I never thought the commies would show up dressed as these idiots! But here they are, right in front of us, sounding so damn smart and so very right in every pronouncement uttered!

Eric Hoffer is smiling, that’s for sure! Me, well…I’m very worried because these clowns now have more power than they should have plus I sense more useful idiots are available for them to hide behind while making such decisions.
R.Philips
Corrales, New Mexico
 

SATIRE…THIS IS SATIRE
Re: Tom Bethell’s A Culture Mired in Callousness:

Tom Bethell quotes Bishop Martin Holley: “As an African American, I am saddened by evidence that black women continue to be targeted by the abortion industry. The loss of any child from abortion is a tragedy, but we must ask: Why are minority children being aborted at such disproportionate rates?”

Bishop Holley should relax. First, this isn’t about race. It’s about class. It just so happens that minority women tend to live in under-served neighborhoods. Going back to the days of Margaret Sanger, the mission has never been to “target” minorities. No. The mission is to ease the burden on the most vulnerable women. Poor women, minority women, women without ready access to health care, women so ignorant that they need someone to tell them that abortion is in their own self-interest. Was it Joe Biden who plagiarized that African-Americans are “poor, uneducated, and easy to command?” Well, it turned out that the suspicious Negroes didn’t trust white women like Sanger. Towards this end, Sanger reached out to African-American clergymen. Suspicious Negroes might not trust white women, but they would follow their unsuspecting preachers. Didn’t Bishop Holley get the memo?

Of course, Sanger was not telling African-American preachers to lead African-American women to the abortion clinic. She just wanted them to practice birth control. But sometimes there is contraceptive failure, which leads to products of conception, which is also known as a fetus, but which should never be referred to as a child. A child is a human person under our Constitution. An African-American fetus is not. A child, being a human person, created in the image and likeness of God, possesses God-given rights, which are recognized by our Constitution. An African-American fetus is not a human person under our Constitution (not even 3/5 of a person), and therefore, has no rights in need of protection.

Does Bishop Holley’s use of a pejorative like “child” serve the interests of African-American women? It is quite clear that Bishop Holley has never studied the Constitution, much less lectured on Constitutional Law. But none of this matters now, because we have President Obama to show us the way.
Dan Martin
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

What’s bizarre and, at least to me, spiritually and socially perverse, is that abortionist-in-chief Barack Obama promotes genocide against the very community to which Obama has tried so long to belong. And the very one that supported him, voting statistically impossible numbers in the general election, and reveres him.

Given that the black population is about 13 percent or so of the total population, Obama helps kill them off at hideous rate. And they and their purported leaders say nothing about it?  

If his active promotion of abortion — and if the Democrats’, liberals’ and leftists’ similarly active promotion of abortion — is not racist and evil, what then will ever be?
C. Kenna Amos

Princeton, West Virginia


HOLLYWOOD TO THE RESCUE

Will we solve our problems? We really could.
Let’s set our sights on Hollywood.

If it’s money that’s needed, the glittering stars
Who fly private jets, drive designer cars,

Should be willing, yea eager! to empty their purses.
Perhaps they’re too busy bringing down curses

On the heads of we smaller folk who pay our fair share,
But we don’t breathe their same special rarified air.

They are important. With industry they are one.
They manufacture the goods that make the country run.

They design planes and ships. They punch time clocks.
Their grasp of the financial markets rocks.

They grow the food on which we subsist.
They perform medical miracles and they insist

Without their guidance army General Petraeus
Would surely flounder and then betray us.

So we look to the stars with hope and good cheer,
Rejoicing in the knowledge that salvation is near.
Mimi Evans Winship

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