12.12.2008
Blame the Financial Sector ... Again
Dean Baker makes the argument that I've been making since the Big Three automakers first came to Washington to ask for a bailout. The biggest reasons for the Detroit automakers' struggles are the financial crisis and the broken U.S. health care system. NOT the UAW. NOT poor management. (Which isn't to say that the companies have been managed well.) Fortunately, it looks as though the White House is going to cave and use TARP money to provide the necessary bridge loan to the automakers. That's good, but why didn't the Administration simply agree to do that from the outset? It would have avoided weeks of pointless negotiation in Congress, and it would have prevented the economic crisis from worsening, which it has.
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Dean Baker, right as usual -- and finally getting some recognition for it. How hard would it have been for other obervers to note the overwhelming contribution of health care costs to the automakers' financial challenges? Where is it written, by the way, that access to health insurance must be coupled to employment status? That doesn't seem to be the rule anywhere else in the world. Arrgghhh!
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