Conclusive circumstantial evidence suggesting why they pay corporate welfare to the big 3

Watch the show "Hardcore Pawn." It's set in Detroit. There are outtakes available on Youtube if the show is not available in your market. It's highly entertaining to watch.

This isn't about race because there's plenty of shady whites among the customers.

Are these people really going to work every day and building cars in a way that's worth their pay? Watch a few episodes and you will highly doubt it.

Can it be the government is paying the big 3 automakers to watch them?

Why don't we let the unwilling workers take over coal mining? They wouldn't really produce much coal so it wouldn't be bad for the environment.

Why doesn't the government take the corporate welfare money and use it instead to pay those people to operate rare earth mines in the Rockies?

It's a case of buying votes. The voters in the big cities where automotive assembly plants are located get a major trickle down effect.

Where are you getting your conclusions from? As someone who grew up in Detroit and knows a ton of people who work for the big 3, most of them are not hanging out in pawn shops. They work as much overtime as they can, live middle class lives and take care of their families. Starting wages in the past few years did drop dramatically but that was pretty much after the show aired.

Any company will have some workers that squander their money but I don't see the correlation between pawnshops and auto makers. You do realize that people commute to work in Detroit and the companies also have manufacturing facilities outside of the city as well?

I also hate to break it to you but many suburban auto workers are not Democrats. My suburb went to Trump in 2016 and 2020 and it's filled with auto workers.

originally posted by: frogs453
Where are you getting your conclusions from? As someone who grew up in Detroit and knows a ton of people who work for the big 3, most of them are not hanging out in pawn shops. They work as much overtime as they can, live middle class lives and take care of their families. Starting wages in the past few years did drop dramatically but that was pretty much after the show aired.

Any company will have some workers that squander their money but I don't see the correlation between pawnshops and auto makers. You do realize that people commute to work in Detroit and the companies also have manufacturing facilities outside of the city as well?

I also hate to break it to you but many suburban auto workers are not Democrats. My suburb went to Trump in 2016 and 2020 and it's filled with auto workers.

Additionally "conclusive circumstantial" evidence sounds like Schrodinger's cat kind of evidence. Along with inconclusive ironclad evidence

a reply to: Solvedit
Got me with the car comment...

If it's industrial, all you need is your hands and memorize a few steps and then rinse and repeat. Just this week I was walked through a production chain. While many had learned / done apprenticeship in motor vehicle building / repair, it's basically a job that anyone with a bit will and braincells can do.

They have tooling and one job: Mount this mirror, plug in that connector, all the while they sit on a conveyor belt and the car is dangling from the ceiling, moving along with them through the complex. When work is done on all stations, the cars move a bit faster on top. When they reach the end of the conveyor, they sit on, it's break time and then go back. Some are circular even.

Many such jobs can be done by someone that want's to work, but is not qualified for anything (because never learned or never had the chance to learn a job). Hence these jobs are often low entry wages and with that you get people struggling and using pawn shops and similar.

I mean in the car business we all joke that we never want a car built on a Friday, but you can't paint the whole industry with a wide brush such as in the OP.

The general idea is that the corporate welfare is only going to cover those who don't get anything done.

Obviously most of the workers get a lot done because there are plenty of American-built vehicles.

Just to clarify,

taking GM as an example even though many companies get corporate welfare,

GM 2018 gross revenue was around $147 billion dollars. Their 2018 net profit was 8.1 billion.

johnwallisonline said GM got a total of $3.58 billion in various subsidies in 2014.

No one is suggesting corporate welfare recipient companies aren't really in business.

But maybe the Federal government is covering the losses when certain unprepared or partially prepared people do a mediocre job in the workplace and they are perceived as being owed reparations.

originally posted by: ThatDamnDuckAgain
a reply to: Solvedit
...it's basically a job that anyone with a bit will and braincells can do...They have tooling and one job:...Many such jobs can be done by someone that want's to work, but is not qualified for anything (because never learned or never had the chance to learn a job). Hence these jobs are often low entry wages and with that you get people struggling and using pawn shops and similar.

You must realize there's costs associated with doing business that way. Designing and manufacturing the parts to be easy and foolproof to assemble, making the assembly line foolproof, etc. takes a lot of extra work.

They'd make more profit if they could hire who they wanted.

a reply to: Solvedit

I know, and I was not speaking ill of those people, not at all, just saying. Only pointing out different circumstances in life.

These factories are very complicated but not everything is fool proof though. Like I wrote, there will be qualified personal but not for every job. Some still have to go inside the car physically and crawl around inside, laying wire harness, for example.

Yes there is a lot to mess up, the tooling alone for mounting the different parts in assembly line, hundreds of them need to be designed, developed, built, tested. So for a single end product, the car, you have insane amounts of knowledge on different sectors to manage.

A car is the most complicated contraption an average human can buy. I wrote it once here, people pay a lot of money for these products so it's understandable they want a faultless product. However, sometimes it's hard to pin down what problem the customers has. The higher the price the more picky they get, bickering about every little noise the car makes.

Why for such customers, I drive the car and the customer is passenger and needs to tell me what he means. One time I spent a whole hour driving around through the region and in circles. Customer said exactly every 12km there's an uggly noise from the back. I drove over 100km and not once there was anything strange. Chased the car over the autobahn.

Then I knew. I asked him to navigate me to his house and from there, I drove slow checking the road. Suddenly he says it's about here where it happens.

Turns out it's a pothole he drives through. I naturally avoid them all, sewer coverings too. Just customer won't notice because I do not swerve but have long calculated my way around these obstacles and it's kind of automatic. But customer just flat out drives into it every day on way to work.

Well what can you say except don't do this? Was an expensive lesson for him. He paid 1.5 hours to get told "Don't drive into potholes" including a little argument that cars, especially his are not build to withstand such things for long. Imagine 19" low profile semi slicks and everyone with a bit of knowledge will know the car is not built to drive into potholes. Buy a Jeep then