Welcome to the United States of European and Canadian Socialism
An article in the SF Chronicle that questions why someone ought to pay their mortgage. By "helping" those who were victimized by predatory lenders, is the government creating incentives for people to NOT pay their mortgage? Are they creating incentives for people to work less to qualify for assistance? Note - this isn't the Wall Street Journal asking the question - it's the San Francisco Chronicle, not exactly the bastion of unfettered free market capitalism.
Let me get all of this straight - we bail out homeowners who bought something they couldn't afford. We bail out mortgage companies and the banks who backed them for making irresponsible lending choices and now we're going to bail out car companies for making cars no one wants to drive so that auto workers can continue to work.
Meanwhile, me and my generation is never going to be able to afford to buy homes because of inflated real estate prices brought on by the mad rush to purchase homes. We're going to be burdened by increased taxes for the short and medium future to pay for 1) Social Security 2) War on Terror 3) To bail out failed industries like autoworkers 4) Bail out irresponsible borrowers and irresponsible lenders and 5) A likely attempt to create Universal Healthcare in the next 8 years
Furthermore, if we were just a little bit responsible and tucked away money in stocks or mutual funds in these past 10 years or so, we can probably assume those are in the tank...since all these companies seemed to think it was a good idea to leverage our money and pay themselves out in year end bonuses.
Great.
UPDATE - The job prospects in the film industry are bad. Predatory film schools encouraged students to take out loans, attend school, spend lots of money on films, and incur debt. Why can't the taxpayers bail us out? Why don't the taxpayers bail out Warner Brothers for Speedracer?
ANOTHER NOTE - Now that I'm thinking about it - you always hear about movie studios "screwing" over artists about money they owe them on the back end. Most recently, the big one was New Line not paying Peter Jackson for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. You always hear about it in the news. But I got to thinking - why don't the "artists" then owe the studios money when they make a big bomb? Studios lose tons of money on crappy big films like The Golden Compass. They don't ask Chris Weitz for their money back. Yet, if the film is successful, Weitz would probably be suing right now asking for more back end. Basically, the success of Lord of the Rings pays for the failures like The Golden Compass. It can't work any other way - because of the nature of the product - you can't know a movie will be a success until after it's made and the investment cost is sunk.
3 comments:
Nicely put and very depressing. I agree with you on all points except the "predatory Film Schools" bit. Let's be honest, we have no one to blame but ourselves for diving deep into debt in order to "learn" the trade of filmmaking. No one was offering overinflated promises of box office bonuses, Oscars and cush studio deals.
i know we film schoolers have no one to blame but ourselves...we went for the glory.
...but by the same logic, no one put a gun to an autoworkers head and told them to make cars, either.
what it comes down to are how do we view adult citizens? are the responsible for their choices (big and small) and their bad luck? or are we all responsible to each other during rough times? and what about our good luck? is that ours or should it belong to everyone?
these are actually really serious questions with consequences that reverberate throughout society. if we don't bail out the auto industry, what happens to the city of detroit? if we do, what happens to all the small businesses who are never able to get off the ground because of the increased taxes they would need to pay in order to fund detroit building these big, crappy cars?
I agree, there are some serious choices ahead that will have fallout for generations, especially ours, but how do you decide? I don't know. I think if we are going to bailout anyone there needs to be strings attached, if we give banks money then they need to change the way they do business, assistance should mean more regulation. And the same goes for the automakers, there is no reason to bail them out if they are going to continue to build cars no one wants to buy or can afford. We need higher standards in place for the production of energy efficient low cost vehicles.
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