Congressman
Henry E. Brown, Jr.

The Senate's decision before Thanksgiving to not take up legislation on the auto bailout clearly signals that the corporate leadership of GM, Ford, and Chrysler must move forward with a significant restructuring of their companies and product lines.  The three U.S. manufacturers, currently burdened with top heavy management, exorbitant and unrealistic employee salaries and benefits at all levels, and union monopolization, are unable to adjust  their product lines to meet the needs of today's consumers and were in financial crisis long before our economy took a turn for the worse.

I do not believe that it is the nation's responsibility to fix them as it was their own bad decision to continue agreeing to the labor unions' demands for exorbitant benefits and retirement packages and to rely on gas guzzlers to make their profit during a time when cost conscious foreign automakers were building cars here in the United States that people want to buy.

Locally, it would be hard for me to go to back to BMW, a company that announced earlier this year that, in a $750 million investment, the volume of cars exported through the Port of Charleston is expected to increase 50 percent to about 150,000 vehicles year, and tell them that I supported giving money to their competitors who made poor business decisions to begin with.

The CEO's of the three manufacturers were sent home after being told that they must come up with an alternate plan, as the original $700 billion bailout money was not allotted for this purpose.  This week they submitted their new plans, and Congress is currently conducting hearings on them.  Below are links to the plans.  Please let me know your thoughts at http://brown.house.gov/Contact/writebrown.html.      

Posted by Henry E. Brown (12-04-2008, 05:04 PM) filed under Economy

 

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