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Originally Posted by LessGovMrPrez
Why do you think companies like Ford are going belly up? Their insurance costs and retirement payouts are bankrupting them.
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You don't think it has anything to do with poor/inconsistent turnstile leadership at the top for decades? Maybe the tens of millions of dollars they spend annually lobbying congress to keep CAFE standars at a level that guarantees we will be buying Iranian oil for the forseeable future? Certainly their insurance and pension obligations are steep, but those are agreements that the company made and they are contractually obligated to keep them.
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Sooner or later the left in this nation will have to come to the realization that in order for people to have jobs, and companies to say afloat that they must have "profits". The more profit, the better. Why do I say that? Well b/c the more profit companies have, the easier it will be for them all to navigate things like A) a recession B) drops in the market globally.
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The problem is not profits. And sooner or later the right is going to have to come to the realization that the problem is poor use of those profits to the detriment of the workers in the US. Free trade is a prime example. Companies can remain profitable and not ship jobs to India and China. Not
as profitable, but still enough to keep the investors happy. What Joe Sixpack sees is that there are quite a few people getting awfully rich on the basis of his and his peers' jobs going to people named Varghese and Chung, instead of people named Smith and Jones. Joe has a right to be mighty pissed off about that.
I use free trade as an example, but that genie has long since left the bottle and isn't going back in. Companies have had the better part of a generation to make outsourcing and the like foundations in their business models. Rescinding it would be even more economically disastrous than what we have now.
But, that said, something needs to change. The pendulum has swung so far in favor of corporate profits that the people that the corporations rely upon for those profits - US (western) consumers - are losing confidence at an increasing pace. Less confidence = lower profits. There has to be a balancing act between unfettered profits and the economic well-being of the consumers. Otherwise, the corporations have thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
Regarding health care: I'm no fan of big government programs that are monuments to Murphy's Law. However, it is clear that the free market is not going to fix this problem. We have known it was a problem since at least the early 90s, and the free market has only bollixed the system even more. They have been batting for fifteen years, and not scored. It's time for some intervention to force reform. When Hillary stepped up to the plate the first time, she struck out on the premise that the free market was best suited to deal with the situation. The free market has since abdicated. Nature abhors a vacuum, and in the absence of free market solutions, governmental solutions to a problem so massive are the only other realistic choice. The question is only how much intervention is just enough. Too much intervention and the system really gets screwed, to little and the system
will reach a breaking point.
In this situation, socialism clearly is not the answer. Unfettered capitalism has also proven that it is not the answer either. There has to be a middle ground, and I know there have to be some smart people out there offering solutions. Unfortunately, you and I can't hear those voices because they are being drowned out by the cacophony from the ones that want total government control screaming back and forth with those that want a broken free market system to solve the problem. And both extremes are wrong.
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