Bailout Fun Continued

So, it's being widely reported now that Obama and the Democrats are getting strongly behind "bailing out" the Big 3 U.S. automakers. I actually find this idea even harder to swallow, in many ways, than bailing out the banks as it's been obvious for well over a decade that the U.S. automakers were falling behind the Japanese carmakers in the quality of their vehicles, both in terms of their reliability and the offering of features that mattered to people, like good fuel efficiency. It doesn't seem right that, now that things have reached a crisis point for them, partly because of the terrible economy, but mostly because of their own incompetence, that they should just be able to call daddy for some money and hit the reset button so to speak.

That said, obviously when 1/10th of the U.S. workforce or so is in some way connected with these big 3 automakers, we can't just sit by and watch them go under. I just would like to bring this back to the ridiculousness of referring to Obama as a "socialist" during the last days of the campaign because he favors a progressive tax system, which, by the way, we already have. Our government does lots of socialist things. Those don't make us "socialists." Similarly, there are innumerable aspects of our government that are anti-democratic, but that doesn't mean we're not a democracy.