Consider buying American!

Corporate income taxes, if they should exist at all, should be based
on total worldwide income for all subsidiaries, multiplied by the
proportion of worldwide sales that occur in the country. Foreign
corporations know it's harder to claim zero income that way, so much
that and when Florida proposed it, several years ago, they loudly
threatened to pull out completely from the state.

 

That was done some time in the early-mid 1990s. So now what?

 

Toyota's annual health care costs are around $100M, worldwide, because
their US workforce is non-union, has much lousier beneifts, especially
in retirement, and almost all other countries have socialized
medicine, including Toyota's home turf, Japan.

 

Jesse Jackson will accuse any company of discrimination unless it has
a deal with his organization or one of his friends' companies (mostly
law firms). I'm not saying Japanese companies are anywhere close to
squeaky clean (Mitsubishi's top management was reportedly e virtually
fascist in its racial attitudes), but Jackson should do more than just
be a publicity hound, and instead he should work more to weed out the
real injustices, as he did with Texaco
(chairman was caught on tape).

Jackson once accused Cypress Semiconductor of racial discrimination,
but its chairman, T.J. Rodgers, who doesn't care one bit about race,
told Jackson that he was ************ (Rodgers is famous for swearing,
even when interviewed by engineering and scientific journals) and that
35% of his company's workforce was non-white, with a slightly higher
in upper management.

 

He's not a racist but instead believes that equal opportunity has to
be verified by results. And before you call me a Jackson defender,
see my post about him and Cypress Semiconductor.

 

It's a good book, but, ironically, when it came out, Ford made
something like record profits, and Nissan lost money.

 

So why does Consumer Reports say that GM's overall quality is on par
with non-union (at least in the US) Nissan's?

Why has CR given bad reliability marks for two non-union made Japanese
vehicles, the Nissan Titan (Mississippi) and the 4WD Toyota Tundra
(Texas)?

Which union members designed crappy cars for Detroit, especially those
furniture-like GM cars?

The car makers were free to reject the union's demands and free to
employ the workers more efficiently.

 

In one.

'Unions' can *possibly* bear some responsibility for high prices - but not
for poor design, materials and quality control.

And of course what all those union bashers seem to forget is that a non
union low paid workforce won't have the money to spend on consumer goods
and services.

 

For 9999 out of 10,000 drivers, FWD makes more sense. Unless you're
into throttle steer and serious performance driving, RWD has no
advantages and some serious disadvantages.

 

The benefits that American automaker retirees have will be reduced if
the automakers go bankrupt.

Jeff

 

When the unions demand that the guy sweeping the bathroom get paid the
same as the guy bolting the engine into the car, that's a problem caused
by the union.

When the union insists on a roomful of "extras" being paid the same wage
as the guys on the line for doing nothing but sitting there waiting just
in case some guy on the line has to go home, that's a problem caused by
the union.

 

CR doesn't give the marks (ratings). They are compiled from
consumers' inputs.

 

Even if true, what has manufacturing low quality cars in models people
don't want to buy done for Ford? The Japanese have the right strategy.
The right strategy has been incredibly obvious to anyone with a brain,
but 30 years after the Japanese starting eating their breakfast, the
US manufacturers still don't have a freaking clue.

I saw GM's CEO give a speech last year in which at one point he argued
against CAFE standard increases for "trucks", because he claimed the
Japanese sold more smaller cars than trucks (and it was easier for
them to hit the average). Then, later in the same speech, he talked
about how sales were down because they weren't selling many tucks
anymore.

Apparently he couldn't connect the dots.

 

The guy sweeping the BR is just as important as the guy assembling the
engine.

I think there is a bigger problem when the CEO gets 100x more than the
lowest paid employee.

And who agreed to the union's demands?

Jeff

 

You misunderstand the tax system. You don't get a "tax credit" for a
loss. You pay taxes on PROFITS. If you don't have any profits, you
don't pay taxes.

You want to talk about tax credits, look at the oil companies. There
was a bill this year that would have ended preferential tax rules for
oil companies. Note that Exxon had record $40b profits again this year
and other oil companies did similarly well. Bush vetoed that idea
because he claimed that eliminating their special treatment would be a
"tax increase" (Apparently not giving his incredibly profitable
friends special tax treatment is not fair).

I'm not aware of any special rules for the auto industry.

 

Yeah, I gotta agree. When did health *insurance* become a service
policy? It's *insurance*, it should pay for the big items, not day to
day expenses. That said, note that most companies have eliminated
health benefits for retirees or required them to pay at least 50% of
the policy cost. Auto workers still have it good if all they lose was
office visits.

 

Maybe Lucas, or RR, did something nicer at that level. Ask anyone else
who's ever worked on a Lucas system on any other British or Italian
car and they will tell you about Lucas quality.

Lucas headlights had a three position switch - dim, flicker, and off.

 

Because they are color blind and apparently can't read their own black
and red circles on those little charts?

Seriously, they make comments like you mentioned in terms of new car
"build quality" (a rating of how many repairs happen in the very early
days of a cars life) and not based on reliability (repairs that happen
over the more realistic life that most of us own cars).

I'm no fan of CR's statistically invalid ratings, but the fact is that
all auto manufacturers have quality issues in some vehicles. Overall,
Japanese cars are still more reliable that US or Euro cars.

Apparently you don't understand labor laws in the USA.

 

WoW! $40 billion already this year! And we're only 1 and 1/2 months into
the year. That's better than I hoped for.

Most of the $40 billion in profit last year was from outside the country.

Can you tell us what this special tax treatment is?

Of the $40 Billion that ExxonMobil made last year, 75% was from outside
the US.

Jeff

 

In the case of Toyota, CR automatically gave new Toyota models high
reliability ratings. not any more.

Jeff