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Originally Posted by fastball
You've done a good job disguising a lot of hot button politics in this post. Ouch.
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NOT political. I'm not suggesting any sort of policy or supporting any sort of political party. Simply bringing up issues that need to be examined.
As a country we need to think about some of these underlying issues that are never ok to discuss. Our auto and defense industries can't remain competitive in the world while saddled with legacy costs of pensions and medical care. Also student debt is crippling our economy. Instead of buying Camaros and Corvettes the money is being spent on repaying student loans. Graduates often have loan payments far in excess of a car payment, often similar to a mortgage payment, and it takes as long as a mortgage to pay them off. And healthcare will never be "solved" because the bottom line is it costs too much.
When our college graduates start adult life saddled with massive debt, and our major manufacturing companies are saddled with massive legacy costs, and our entire population is saddled with healthcare that costs several times what it costs in other countries, things won't go well no matter what we do.
It's time to pull heads out of the sand and discuss how to solve these issues. The current problems with GM and Ford didn't just happen out of the blue, and it's not just because the Germans and Japanese build better cars.
Henry Ford has got to be turning over in his grave... He understood it's better to have 100 people that can afford to buy one of his cars than one person who can afford to buy 100 cars. He more than doubled his workers wages so they could afford to buy his cars. He said it was one of the best cost-cutting measures he's ever come up with. Just something to think about...
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The $5 day didn’t kill Ford, or American capitalism, as many capitalists had warned. By 1916, profits doubled and sales continued to boom. “The payment of $5 a day for an eight-hour day was one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made,” he said. By 1921, Ford had half the U.S. car market and, thanks to falling costs and rising wages, the price of a Model T stood at about half the level of per-capita income. Ford pioneered a massive new industry whose wages set the tone for the country and turned Detroit into a high-wage metropolis.
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https://www.thedailybeast.com/henry-...im-more-profit