The path to bankruptcy

I bet most people who read this have heard all about the big automakers crying for bailouts from the U.S. government. I bet a lot of you have read about the reasons for many their troubles. Just in case, let me summarize a big one for you here:

Although workers in companies like Toyota actually earn a higher salary on average, the worker cost to the company is nearly half that of the Big Three. People have been claiming that the Big Three pay out $75/hr per worker rather than $35-40/hr like the others do. Now, Factcheck has claimed that number is false, but even in their explanation, they acknowledge it's importance. The $75/hour is not valid for any single Joe you might point out in their company. However, when you tally up all the workers, all the retirees, and all the unemployed of the business, and divide the costs among only those who are actually working for their salary, $75/hr per worker is what you get.

Generous union contracts include, among other things, 100% salary in retirement for life, company health insurance for retirees for life, and full 100% salary for the unemployed in the business while allowing those unemployed to refuse new positions that have opened up within the company meanwhile. How many of those unemployed do you think have snapped up the first position that opened up for them? As noted above, the other automakers pay their working people more, but the companies in trouble are paying huge numbers of people to do absolutely nothing.

Now, apparently, Obama has decided that this is the best way for the U.S. government to operate. From Reuters:

Proposals included extending unemployment compensation to part-time workers, subsidizing employers who must continue health insurance benefits temporarily for laid-off and retired employees and allowing workers who lose jobs that did not include insurance to apply for Medicaid, the Times said. ...Citing Obama advisers, the newspaper said the package, which could face resistance from Republicans and conservative Democrats, would cost at least $775 billion.

"This has really forced people to think outside the box," the Times quoted a House Appropriations Committee aide as saying, "because this is more money than anybody expected to be spending."[emphases mine]

Yes, you've heard it right. Paying heavily for people who aren't working has been crippling our auto manufacturers, so why not do it in the government, too? Why on earth would Obama do something like this during an economic crisis when we've got such recent evidence of it's total failure to maintain a cost-effective company?

Well, to understand that, you've got to remember what his goal is, what the Liberal goal is, being entirely antithetical to the Conservative goal. His goal is to promote dependence on the government. What matters to the liberals is not that this course of action sunk the Big Automakers. What matters to them is that it brought the Big Automakers to the Big Government looking for help. That's the goal.

So in that sense, the failure of the automakers signals success for Obama's goals rather than failure. It worked with the automakers. Will it work with the rest of us? It looks like he wants to find out.