"Huge segment" is a matter of perspective. Three million people losing their jobs would hurt a lot of family members and kids. That’s about the number of votes cast in Minnesota this year, which helps make the number real. Imagine all the adults in the state of Minnesota losing their jobs at once. However, the collapse of the domestic auto industry isn’t that geographically isolated.

But 3 million is also only 2.5% of the 130 million employed in the US (over age 16). There are twice that many in the construction trades, alone. Two-and-a-half percent, even if it’s millions, isn’t “a huge segment.” Although, in some areas, I know it would represent more than 2.5% of the working population.

The unfortunate reality is that many of these jobs are located in industrial areas that have been economically tenuous since the 1970s, like the town where I grew up. If these people do lose their jobs, there’s not going to be anything in the area for them to move into.

Even so, I don’t support federal assistance for the Detroit 3. GM’s robbing their piggy bank for over a billion bucks a month. If they got 1/2 of the $25 billion bailout, they’d be back in a year if not sooner. Federal assistance just prolongs the unfortunately inevitable, in my opinion. This problem has been building for decades, and won’t be solved by artificially propping them up for 12 months.

How about if Congress contracts to buy 100K new, improved Detroit cars. The cars have to be electric, hybrid, or flexfuel.

Congress then holds a lottery, open to every American taxpayer (i.e., anyone who actively paid some amount >$0.00 in income tax), to award these 100K cars.

(The government might want to keep some fraction of this number for its own use, thereby saving some money on its own vehicle fleet needs. I’m okay with that, as long as it doesn’t exceed 5% of the total.)

All taxpayers have an equal chance of getting some concrete return for the use of their tax dollars in bailing out Detroit. The value of the car would exceed the amount of tax liability that would be their individual lot in the bailout, so at least some will end up in the black.

Non-taxpayers may gripe at the ‘unfairness’ of this, but as they are not paying for the bailout, through tax payments, their gripe can be ignored.

BTW, I disagree with Dean that allowing the big three to go bankrupt is ‘tossing [this industry] out the window’. Cars are and will still be made in the US. The successful (foreign) car manufacturers will increase their production and will need new bodies on the lines. Auto parts and service will still be needed. Car salesmen will still be selling cars, just different ones. Insurance companies will still offer insurance; body, repair, and paint shops will still be doing business.

The only difference is that they’ll be doing it on different brands of cars.

Oh, some will certainly lose their jobs. And some will certainly lose a percentage of their wage & benefits packages. But it is not the end of the world.

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If Chapter 11 bankruptcy is not a good solution for the problems of the auto industry, then maybe what Congress should be doing is to add new provisions to the code which can be applied in certain situations…for example, under certain situations the warranty claim reserve of a company could be guaranteed by the government, to ease consumer fears of buying from a company in reorganization. There could be an escrowing of product design & support data such that parts manufacturing could potentially be picked up by another company. And so on. But somebody ought to be thinking about general, reusable approaches, not just about the crisis du jour.