GM makes more cars that get 30+ MPG than Toyota, but here in America, we like, we buy and we drive SUVs. Or we did, until the price of gas suddenly shot up to almost $5 per gallon.

Over the years, our government made our factories the safest, cleanest, best paying plants in the world. Then the government started mandating clean air standards and safety regulations, changing them every years, to further drive up the price of manufacturing.

While our government was making life better for Americans, Japan and Germany, while subsidizing their industries, made dirt cheap cars in filthy, unsafe conditions. Soon a cheap, low end Japanese or German car (think Datsun and original Beetle) cost much less than a cheap American car. Germany and Japan then started introducing high end cars, and capturing that market too.

The government responded with tariffs, and Detroit used that home court, protectionist advantage to manufacture and sell the worst cars they possibly could. K-car, anybody? The stigma of producing unreliable automobiles that American car industry earned in that era still lives on.

Meanwhile, Japan built plants here to avoid the tariffs, and continued to undermine the American manufacturers by keeping their currency artificially low, and subsidizing the car industry.

Our government is as much to blame as any party. They were quite adept at looking at the present, but not so much at the future. That was Japan’s forte.

I’ve been on both sides of the union fence, I’ve been a union worker and I’ve been management having to deal with unions and I have to say, from someone who strongly favors a free market, unions suck from either side of the fence. From the worker’s perspective, you never really make enough additional money to offset all the concessions and money you have to pay the union and from the management perspective, bad employees are protected from being properly terminated or disciplined, I had to run everything past the union reps to do virtually anything whatsoever, they were really running the show and they knew it.

Seriously, if the government is going to give money to these morons, the first thing they need to do is see that the CEO, CFO and COOs are all terminated off the bat, these are the people ultimately responsible for the failures at these companies, why should they get to stay on when they already ruined the viability of the company? No parachutes, golden, platinum or any other color either, they walk away with the clothes on their backs and the contents of their bank accounts, nothing more, I don’t care what their contracts say. If they don’t like it… don’t ask for money from the government, just go out of business. Second, have independent auditors go over these companies with a fine-tooth comb, any improprieties, any illegal behaviors, any funny accounting needs to be dealt with in the harshest legal means possible. Put the crooks away. Finally, we bust the UAW whether they like it or not. The Big Three pays, when you figure in all compensation, $73 an hour. Toyota, for their U.S. plants, pays $48 an hour. It’s no wonder GM can’t make a profitable small car to save their lives, they have a ridiculous amount of labor overhead.

The time has come to actually solve these problems, we cannot just throw $25 billion to Detroit every couple of months and not insist that the problems be solved immediately and decisively. We all know what the problems are, it’s time to remove the option not to solve them from the people who, as you very rightly say, feel entitled to their huge slice of the pie.