Chevy with a 454 in the hood, got 125 on the dash

The auto industry bailout proposition leaves a bad taste in my mouth. A few weeks ago, the heads of the big 3 traveled to DC in private jets looking for federal funds to save their ailing companies. Now they're staging it, traveling from Detroit to DC in hybrids. What a transparent move. For over a decade now, Japan has been defeating the US manufacturers. Why? Because they built better cars, and they made them cheaper than us. When Toyota and Honda started building hybrids, the Big 3 built larger and larger SUVs. The result was obvious. Year after year, Ford, Chrysler, and GM lost money as fuel prices rose. For the last four years, I've been wondering when Detroit was going to realize their mistake, but they never did. Perhaps one could argue that the cost of manufacturing hybrids in the US was too much to compete with Japan. Perhaps the UAW had too much of a stranglehold on the US automakers. But it really just appears that they had their heads too far up their own behinds to give Americans what they wanted: quality, fuel-efficient cars. While Japan wiped the floor with Detroit, the Big 3 just made their cars bigger and less efficient. And now they're about to lose those behinds.

If I had terrible business practices and refused to listen to reason or to accept irrefutable facts, I wouldn't expect my neighborhood to come along and empty their pockets for me. But this is exactly what Detroit wants. They want the American Taxpayer (or at least the Fed) to just pony up for their idiocy.

This is the new paradigm.