Blog 8: Commentary on Politico Goes Commando

I drove through a Ford parking lot last week and was surprised to find half the parking lot full of F150s. I drive a compact car, but had the gas prices not gone down, my bike (pink bedazzles and all) would have been drug out of the attic and become my main source of transportation. I would have only used my car for that quarterly trip to Wal-mart for kitty litter. The bulk bag is 18 cents cheaper per pound, but there is no way I could cycle that baby all the way home. It should be obvious that if I am willing to trade in my little car for my Hello Kitty bike no one in their right mind is purchasing trucks right now.
I agree with Politico Goes Commando that American Auto Makers are over producing unsatisfactory products. Politico’s blog is well written and to the point. I also agree that it’s a little too late for the companies to be looking into a smarter way to make cars. This isn’t a 7th grade Design Your Own Company Project where you can just file a request for more money because you screwed up. An intelligent businessman predicts future changes in preference or style and changes with the tide. I feel for the workers and the workers in other fields that will suffer subsequently, but isn’t there another way around this besides taking more money out of my pocket? Maybe the financial institutions gave every failed company who convinces Congress to squeeze more money out of the hardworking Americans to pay for their stupidity a bad name. But if I am going to pay for a “Wellness Retreat” it is going to be for the Father of four who just got laid off not the executives who make more in a month than my entire family of eight’s annual salaries combined.

Blog 7: Big Girls Don't Cry

I over drafted my bank-account last week by 47 cents and was charged a $45 overdraft fee. Yet my bank and many others overdraft their accounts by trillions and are just handed the money by the government. Reports flooded the internet recently claiming that the banks used the money to get stone massages and pay those ten million dollar Christmas bonuses that were promised to their executives. Why isn’t something being done about this? (..Besides proposing to give out more money to failed businesses.) Maybe those rumors aren’t true, but I have no way to know without hacking into the companies’ financial statements. And I am too young to go prison. America was built on the idea that less government interference was better. If this applies to regulating companies, shouldn’t it apply to saving them? My economics professor said that we shouldn’t let companies get so big that if they fail we fail. But it wouldn’t be very American to deny a large company the chance to grub more money.
We need to choose one way or the other. If we don’t want big brother having a say in everything that we do than we can’t run crying to big brother when we get our lunch money stolen.