Many of the commenters are quite smart and knowledgeable, and GM to its credit doesn’t shy away from printing their critiques. Bob doesn’t respond directly, however; he posts and then the commenters fly with it.

But there’s a bigger picture here, one that’s obvious now to most CEOs of firms large and small. Our health insurance system is broken. It’s hugely unfair that one’s coverage depends almost entirely on one’s employer. So an ambitious kid who refuses to shlep it at the River Rouge plant and joins a small startup gets, in many cases, absurdly priced coverage while his slacker buddies at the UAW get the most generous plan in the nation?!

It’s also massively inefficient: the US spends ~15% of overall healthcare cost on processing paperwork and claims, as compared to only 7% for — get this– Sweden’s system. This absurd, wasteful, unfair system is driving Fortune 2000 firms out of business, and the only path to survival for Lucent and GM and IBM and GE and Ford and Caterpillar and the telcos and any other legacy industrial company is for them to screw their retirees out of their health insurance benefits. That’s not fair, it’s not American, and it is not economically or socially or politically sustainable.

Rick Waggoner is right: health insurance is a national problem, and a national political responsibility. Long past time. Get this back on the national agenda asap. And this time, get it done. No Hillarycare, no FristInsuranceMafia. Just fix it.

But lets not overlook how much Detroit and Michigan contributed to our modern world. Take a drive through Silicon Valley and then go take a drive through suburban Detroit. Know what you’ll find? They are identical in spirit, focus and approach.

Agree and disagree. You’re right that Detroit was the Silicon Valley of the industrial world during the first half of the 20c. As with high tech’s winner-take-all market consolidation, the auto industry consolidated from something like 200 auto companies at the start of the century to ~30 by 1930, ~8 by 1950 and 4 by 1970. Soon to be only 1 wholly US-owned company: will Ford or GM go under first?

But today’s Detroit suburbs are populated largely by bureaucratic drones and Big Labor’s aristocrats. Any Detroit kid with any entreprenurial spirit would not be caught dead working for one of the Big 3, and lights out for one of the coasts as soon as he comes of age.

Recent examples:

– Steve Ballmer (Bloomfield Hills; Det Country Day School) helped Gates build MSFT;

– Scott McNealy (Country Day School also) founded Sun Microsystems;

– Johnny Fisher (Birmingham, MI; Cranbrook class of ‘79) started Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the heavyweight silicon valley VC;

Other distinguished Detroit entrepreneurs who went east rather than west:

– Ivan Boesky (Cranbrook) nearly cornered the 1980s high yield debt market with Mike Milk’em before discovering prison and the talmud;

– Mlle . Louise Ciccone (Rochester, MI, Ecole des Coups Durs, ‘79) founded her own multi-million $$$ global brand;

I was waiting for someone to come by and talk about the 1979 Citation as indication of American car quality. I agree that many Americans left the Big Three behind for those reasons and they aren’t coming back. However, lets get real American cars are very well built now. GM and Ford, but not Chrysler, are once again in trouble because of the high price of gas. They rely too much on SUVs and Trucks to make a profit at today’s gas prices. I have no clue why Chrysler should doing ok because they also make their money from big vehicles. Maybe it’s because of all the good work they have done at their design center that a previous poster claims no longer exists.

American cars are very competitive pricewise. But Detroit, particularly GM, cut corners for decades and lost an entire generation of car buyers, people like me. You know what I remember about GM cars when I was growing up? I remember seeing Caddies with tail lights hanging off the ends of 8-inch metal poles because the decorative plastic on the fake tail fins ROTTED OFF after a year or two. Same with the decorative molding around the bumpers. It was weird seeing a heavy chrome bumper hanging off separate from the rest of the car!

Remember the Citation? Came out in 1979, I believe. Remember what they looked like 3 years later? All of them had missing sections in the body panels near the rear and front bumpers, where GM used that plastic crap as a substitute for good steel.

How about vinyl ceiling liners that fell down after a year or two? Remember having to thumbtack the vinyl back up? Lots of people remember that.

And what the hell happened to Saturn? That was a hot division in the early 1990s, and they built pretty good cars for the time.

I don’t blame the union guys. They do what they are told. I blame management. Current management? Can’t say. They were handed a turd and they probably won’t be able to polish it.

“There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures.”

–Shakespeare, “Julius Caesar”

This quote leads off a Roger Kimball essay on how to do something about the abysmal political state of the Academy (which is apparently no longer teaching “actual” economics–see GM, Ford).

A federal judge just today ruled that UAL could dump its pension fund on a federal work-out agency, wash its hands, and let the feds pay out the much reduced pension fund–prob. at 70% or so, a news report guessed. This is where GM Pension Plan will end up, unless UAW faces that turnip/blood reality. Or is it the kill-the-golden-goose…such a rich array of aphorisms announce themselves.

Which is why, if they’re going to make a move against the unions, they need to do it now while they can guarantee a Republican as president.

That was 1 of the stupidest things I ever heard.

US car quality has surpassed German car quality, overall.