Got Nuthin' Wrote:
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>
> If government regulation is responsible for
> destroying GM Ford and Chrysler then how do you
> explain Toyota and Honda's success; aren't they
> subject to the same big bad government regulation?

Their cars, yes. Their corporate, cultural, and labor structure, no. And in some cases, the government regulation only aided the foreign auto makers to the detriment of US auto makers.

When CAFE standards were first enacted, it immediately favored foreign auto makers whose cars were smaller as per the particular cultural differences of the sponsor nation(s) in question. Japanese cars were smaller because that's what their consumers demanded, while US cars were bigger because that's what we liked. All CAFE did was force US automakers to make thousands of smaller superfluous (and BTW more dangerous) cars no one wanted to buy, just so they could keep the overall average fuel economy under that required by the regs. Remember cars like the Pinto or the Gremlin? They never would have been created and thus never would have violated our beautiful highways with thier ungodly presence were it not for those idiotic CAFE standards.

Now Bush and the Dems have raised the CAFE standard to 35 mpg (even though most subcompacts don't even reach that standard!). I wonder what kinds of government sanctioned monstrosities await our viewing pleasure in the coming years as the remaining scraps of our once proud US auto industry just so they can continue to sell the actual cars we want, aka more SUV's?

Japanese cars were not subjected to union extremes; ours were.

The one way US auto makers could make profits against their higher labor costs was to sell vehicles with higher markups, aka the SUV. But anytime there was a fuel price spike or CAFE standards were made more stringent, the US makers suffered. For the record, both fuel price spikes and CAFE standards are the bastard stepchildren of liberal government policy.

As for what to do about Amtrak, I'll reiterate again: Reprivatize it back to the Class I's with the right package of incentives.