A Little Bit of Socialism Never Hurt Anyone

As you may or may not have heard, General Motors is asking for $10 billion in government aid to help with its merger with Chrysler. If you thought that banks defaulting was bad, this is really bad. The car industry has been the core of the US economy and the fact that two of the big three car companies are seeking to merge is a telling sign. While I feel that a lot of why the car industry is struggling is through mismanagement and poor decision making, we cannot ignore the fact that GM alone provides jobs for 350,000 directly and another 4.5 million in related fields. Moody's credit rating has lowered both car companies ratings into "junk-level" and is considering to lower the other big US car company, Ford. Not only that GM's market value has dropped below what it was in 1929!! This is not good. The main problem I see is that since we are a consumption based economy and recently our economic standing has caused a lot of people to stop spending. Without them spending, we need someone to fill that void. Enter government. Now this will require some of us (the rich 1%) to pay a little more in taxes, so we can afford to not cut costs and invest in major US companies. While one presidential candidate has claimed that we need not raise taxes, and instead we should cut spending, this is exactly what we can't afford. That would be banking on the average consumer to spend, which as we can clearly see, he is not. Therefore, a little bit of socialism (as the conservatives have now labeled big government) wouldn't be so bad.