Harley Davidson, like most companies, is perusing bailout money. Yes, The Motor Company, has apparently fallen from grace with the financial gods.
For years now, I've thought HD made a significantly inferior product to the Japanese alternatives. In the last few years HD has made significant improvements in their technology and quality control. They had to. They were rapidly losing market share to superior motorcycles that cost less money. No doubt this had some impact on their current situation.
But what really gets me is that they pretty much did the same thing banks did. That is, target individuals with subprime loans on their grossly expensive motorcycles. HD reportedly had 30% of their loan portfolio in subprime loans. More than 5% of their loans were delinquent 30 days or more at the end of 2008. I have a friend that fell into this category.
This pisses me off. Once again we have a company that engages in poor business practices and now we may bail them out as well. Why do we keep doing this?
Recently, a friend of mine sent me an editorial comment based upon the latest round of trillion-dollar expenditures from the Obama administration. My response to him was as follows:
You know, [my friend]....I can't even keep up with all the spending and bail-outs anymore. I wasn't a huge McCain supporter, but I recall him saying that he would start cutting programs and that Obama would spend, spend, spend. Of course, McCain was pretty far off target because he only estimated a $1 Trillion dollar budget that Obama had in mind. We have already surpassed that and are heading for more.
It's interesting that people really liked to rail on Bush about the deficit and his spending. Did you know that when Bush left office the 2009 budget had a deficit of "only" $500 Billion? Even with the war in Iraq and the first bail-out and all that it was that low. So they railed on him at how much he spent. The big one was "Bush doubled the deficit in his eight years in office." Great. Obama tripled it in his first quarter.
I'm a pretty firm believer in capitalism and keeping the government out of the private enterprise. I do not believe that we should be bailing all these companies out. I really don't believe that we should be bailing them out and trying to take control over them and that's what part of all these stimulus bills are doing. I don't believe that we should be earmarking all this pork and continuing to run up the deficit that our grandkid’s grandkids will have to pay for. If anything, history showed us that if the government stayed out of it that we returned to prosperity in a short amount of time. The first great depression lingered because Truman got the government involved. The previous depressions recovered fairly quickly because the government didn't' get involved.
Even the individual states are filing cease-and-desist orders against the federal government to keep them out of states business. That's why so many states are turning down the money. They don't want the strings attached to it. The private companies and banks are doing the same thing. But the government is forcing it down their throats. Why? So they can have control of them. Our constitution was explicitly written to prevent this type of behavior and yet it's happening.
For a long time, people miss-used the term "fascist." The true definition of fascism is a government controlled private entity. I think that it’s what the Obama administration is trying to do. I think that the Democrats finally see their window of opportunity to turn us into a socialist state. I wouldn't go so far as to say communist, yet. But socialism is usually the first step to communism. Destroy the economy and make the people reliant on the government and you have an easy avenue for socialism. It's already happening. The government is in the process of federalizing banks, and private enterprise (fascism) and pushing more socialist programs through all this spending.
I also think that this spending is a slush fund for the DNC to continue to steamroll their war on republicans and capitalism. And further, it's quite obvious that at least some of this pork and the ludicrous things they are doing are to pay off Obama's buddies that helped get him into office. Just look at the presidential order to waive contract negotiations and mandate that all road construction go to unionized companies.
I'm not saying that I have the right answer. I'm not sure what that is, but I certainly believe that we should be treading lightly and not pushing these bills through. [my g/f] once said that if someone tells you they have the definitive, de-facto answer, that they probably are wrong and haven't examined the issue well enough. I tend to agree with that, but even she can't see that is exactly what the DNC and Obama have said, which makes me wonder.....
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