GM and Chrysler are asking for $22 billion more. Are you SERIOUS?

As a taxpayer, I'd much rather just throw the bailout money at the white/blue collar workers who will soon be unemployed rather than piss more money down the uninventive American automobile industry.

GM and Chrysler employ (according to Google Finance) roughly 300,000 people combined. If you just split the $22 billion among all the workers, that'd be, on average, roughly $75,000. Give it to them tax-free. Scale the amount they get based on seniority and job specificity (newer white collar workers can readapt their skills to other industries).

Given the average blue collar employee probably makes $50,000/year (total in my head calculation), that's a year and a half of tax-free salary.

And that's not assuming more efficient companies don't pick up the slack. Just because a car company is Japanese doesn't mean they only employ Japanese workers - according to this article: "The internationals also employ some 113,000 Americans, compared with 239,000 at U.S.-owned carmakers." Foreign corporations cross national boundaries with such ease that "foreign made" is an outdated notion. Many "foreign" cars are actually made right here, in the States.

I wouldn't be so averse to American car companies if they demonstrated an ability to innovate or spend capital wisely. From being wildly profitable, they somehow became second-tier incredibly fast (does anybody remember when Audis were considered crap cars?). Sure, they got blind-sided with high oil prices, but where was the investment into hybrids and electric cars?

Just review the facts (these are from this WSJ article):

• GM and Ford lost $110 billion in capital due to bad investments in the 1980s
  
• In the past decade, GM has destroyed $182 billion in capital
• All in all, about $465 billion has been squandered by these two companies since the 1980s. With that money, "GM and Ford could have closed their own facilities and acquired all of the shares of Honda, Toyota, Nissan, and Volkswagen."

These companies have a track record of losing. What they're facing now is certainly exacerbated due to the current economic climate, but they need to demonstrate how giving money to them now is going to help them become profitable entities once again - it's not enough to just say, "We need this money to stay afloat."

And really, just look at American cars. How about just producing cars that don't suck? How did Kia go from a joke when they first started to offering the lowest total cost of ownership of cars so fast?

Tomorrow I'll try to write a story about Porsche - a model of an automobile company that managed to adapt and invest its capital wisely. And how they also took hedge funds for $30 billion in a single day (true story). Ooh, it's like a teaser!