I just received some food for thought, via e-mail:
Breaking News Alert
The New York Times
Monday, February 23, 2009 – 7:02 PM ET
Poll Shows Broad Support for Obama’s Leadership
President Obama is benefiting from high levels of confidence
among Americans about his leadership, according to the latest
New York Times/CBS News poll.
A majority of people surveyed in both parties said Mr. Obama
was striving to work in a bipartisan way, but most Americans
faulted Republicans for their response to the president.
Mr. Obama will deliver his first address to Congress on
Tuesday evening against a backdrop of deep economic anxiety
among the public, with worries spanning party, class and
regional divides.
Last year’s sky high fuel prices were a major hit to the Detroit three who made mostly gas guzzlers. Now that gas is cheap again, the customers have either no access to credit or are behind in their payments on everything else.
…and many people expect gas prices to go back up as soon as the economy recovers.
Quite right, this is the third time his has happened, and the public is finally starting to smarten up to the fact that gas prices are a function of inventories and next inventory depletion will sned the price soaring again!
VC, those results are not surprising; all you have to doi is turn on the TV or read the business section of any newspaper. Whatever Obama or Congress do will take at east a YEAR to make itself felt in terms of new hiring and increased optimism. So a 2 year recession is my best guess as well, followed by a very slow recovery.
Remem,ber, FDR kick-started things in 1933, and it took till the outbreak of WW II in 1939 for the economy to start moving again. Lend Lease to Britain was a good stimulant to the US economy.
After the first two years of Cinton it’s been the official policy of dems NOT to raid the trust fund and what Gore and Kerry campaign on…so more correctly “recent history”.
Bush changed all that.
But nobody, neither Dem. or Rep., put a stop to the raiding of the S.S. trust fund that was already taking place. If they did, we would not be facing a crisis with S.S. benefits as the Baby Boomers age. All we have to do is stop using funds from the S.S. trust fund for anything other than S.S. benefits and the crisis will be averted.
Actually, those results may be surprising to those who earlier stated their opinions that Obama himself is responsible for the downturn in auto sales and for the general malaise in the economy. Anyone who has actually understood the events of the past 8 months or so would be hard-put to support that conclusion, but it was stated in earlier posts, nevertheless.
I agree with you that it will likely take 2 years or so for the economy to get back on a decent footing, but at least during that 2 year period, fewer people will lose their homes and more people will be employed as a result of recent legislation.
Was it Henry Ford who insisted that you have to pay your workers enough to buy your product if you want them to buy your product. Outsourcers seemed to have forgotten this notion. But here’s what I’d like to see offered on a new car:
Rear engine, rear wheel drive, therefore less need for power steering
Bolt-on fenders like the old VW beetles
A steel frame like cars used to have and trucks still have
Standardized seal beam headlamps (cheaper to replace)
A split windshield with a center pillar (so you only have to replace half the windshield if it gets broken)
Narrower, harder tires, therefore less need for power steering and better fuel economy
Shock absorbers instead of Mac-struts (cheaper to replace)
But nobody is making this car or anything like it.
They are already up. I’m paying about $0.60 more per gallon now than a few months ago. The refiners cut capacity in the past few months to make the price go up. The only ting we can do is control our consumption.
President Obama couldn’t be responsible for this downturn. He wasn’t even in the Senate when the bills were passed in the 1990s and early 2000s. But this doesn’t mean anything except that he has no voting record on those subjects.
I thought it was time for me to chime in on what started as a late night rant about my skepticism that Detroit can adjust and offer us cars that meet the new realities in America. Then again Lee Iococca did it once before so maybe there is a car guy in Detroit who gets it like Lee did.
Politics took over the thread and I guess that’s expected given the right/left polarity in America but I was not thinking about politics at the time. Can any party, politician, or program really turn this around? I’m hoping the answer is yes, but that is a hope.
I feel a bunch of the mess we have today lands on Bush and Chaney. They were oil guys and their policies were aimed at getting oil, opening up more drilling, and making sure sources of oil (Iraq) were “friendly” to America. Attempts to increase fuel standards, regulate light trucks which were not covered by any fuel standards, and develop other sources of energy were consistently thwarted by the Bush administration. Opp’s; the war in Iraq didn’t end as quickly as the premature victory speech attests. The restoration of the flow of Iraqi oil, with more reserves than just about anywhere on earth, didn’t happen on schedule. Then shortages and demand drove up prices.
While all that was going on, nobody was keeping tabs on Wall Street. And people were using appreciation gains on their houses to finance a lifestyle that was out of line with their incomes.
Can you say perfect storm! This is not going to end quickly.
jt–Read the earlier posts, including the one that stated that Obama’s “negativity” regarding our current economic situation was the reason for poor car sales. The person who posted that opinion told us that he bought a new car in November because we still had an “optimistic” leader at that point, but that he wouldn’t buy one now because Obama is not expressing enough optimism. That…unconventional…assessment of the situation was what sparked most of the political talk in this thread.
You’re talking about weight and moving people around in two ton cars…you must have a big part of your portfolio in Exxon./
There are flaws in all of your suggestions…that’s why they’re not done anymore…don’t forget the horse.
Simple. Wages of the working man are not keeping up with the market and cost of living. Technology is taking over the world. Technology is expensive. Working class people continue to get paid the same year in, year out, while cost of living gets higher and higher thanks to technology. There are more working class people than there are middle class or wealthy people. So the working class can’t afford to buy luxuries like new cars and new houses, because they can barely afford to keep a roof over their head. If US raised the wages for working class people, they could afford to stimulate the economy more by making large scale purchases. More people would have better paying jobs too if they weren’t judged on their credit score for employment. There’s other things I could add to this but this is just scratching the surface of the mountains of problems…
My response had nothing to do with the original thread. There’s no need to reread anything. I wanted to point out that President Obama is so new to politics that it would be hard to blame him for anything - yet.
The mortgage banking crisis is largely a Democrat thing. They insisted that just about anyone with a job should be able to buy a house. That, in large part, led to the huge number of mortgage defaults. Republicans had a hand in the mess, too, by making it entirely too easy for just about anyone to become a mortgage broker and reduce their own risk by bundling and selling mortgages about as fast as they were let.
Detroit is making a longer lasting product these days…and saturating the market with more inventory that few want to buy more of because they already have one.
I do not want to buy another truck yet no matter how fuel efficient or low priced it may be, I have three already , 79 chev C10 short stepside, 92 Ford Explorer, and 06 Ford Escape hybrid. Keep right on making 1,000,000 vehicles a day and I’m not buying one.