Biden to USA:

[THE_SOOTHSAYER]

GM and Bin Laden!!!

I got nothin' else.

Meanwhile, many experts think GM will be bankrupt again sometime in the next year.

[DDNYjets]

LOL.

Lets make $40k electric cars that nobody will buy.

I can't wait for the Biden/Ryan debate.

[THE_SOOTHSAYER]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiswoo...kruptcy-again/

General Motors Is Headed For Bankruptcy -- Again


President Obama is proud of his bailout of General Motors. That’s good, because, if he wins a second term, he is probably going to have to bail GM out again. The company is once again losing market share, and it seems unable to develop products that are truly competitive in the U.S. market.

Right now, the federal government owns 500,000,000 shares of GM, or about 26% of the company. It would need to get about $53.00/share for these to break even on the bailout, but the stock closed at only $20.21/share on Tuesday. This left the government holding $10.1 billion worth of stock, and sitting on an unrealized loss of $16.4 billion.

Right now, the government’s GM stock is worth about 39% less than it was on November 17, 2010, when the company went public at $33.00/share. However, during the intervening time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen by almost 20%, so GM shares have lost 49% of their value relative to the Dow.

It’s doubtful that the Obama administration would attempt to sell off the government’s massive position in GM while the stock price is falling. It would be too embarrassing politically. Accordingly, if GM shares continue to decline, it is likely that Obama would ride the stock down to zero.

GM is unlikely to hit the wall before the election, but, given current trends, the company could easily do so again before the end of a second Obama term.

In the 1960s, GM averaged a 48.3% share of the U.S. car and truck market. For the first 7 months of 2012, their market share was 18.0%, down from 20.0% for the same period in 2011. With a loss of market share comes a loss of relative cost-competitiveness. There is only so much market share that GM can lose before it would no longer have the resources to attempt to recover.

To help understand why GM keeps losing market share, let’s look at the saga of the Chevy Malibu.

The Malibu is GM’s entry in the automobile market’s “D-Segment”. The D-Segment comprises mid-size, popularly priced, family sedans, like the Toyota Camry and the Honda Accord. The D-Segment accounted for 14.7% of the total U.S. vehicle market in 2011, and 21.3% during the first 7 months of 2012.

Because the D-Segment is the highest volume single vehicle class in the U.S., and the U.S. is GM’s home market, it is difficult to imagine how GM could survive long term unless it can profitably develop, manufacture, and market a vehicle that can hold its own in the D-Segment. This is true not only because of the revenue potential of the D-Segment, but also because of what an also-ran Malibu would say about GM’s ability to execute at this time in its history.

GM is in the process of introducing a totally redesigned 2013 Chevy Malibu. It will compete in the D-Segment with, among others, the following: the Ford Fusion (totally redesigned for 2013); the Honda Accord (totally redesigned for 2013); the Hyundai Sonata (totally redesigned for 2011); the Nissan Altima (totally redesigned for 2013); the Toyota Camry (refreshed for 2013); and the Volkswagen Passat (totally redesigned for 2012).

Automobile technology is progressing so fast that the best vehicle in a given segment is usually just the newest design in that segment. Accordingly, if a car company comes out with a new, completely redesigned vehicle, it had better be superior to the older models being offered by its competitors. If it is not, the company will spend the next five years (the usual time between major redesigns in this segment) losing market share and/or offering costly “incentives” to “move the metal”.

Uh-oh. At this point, it appears that the 2013 Malibu is not only inferior to the 2012 Volkswagen Passat, it’s not even as good as the car it replaces, the 2012 Chevy Malibu.

If you follow the automobile enthusiast press, you know that, under the leadership of then product czar Bob Lutz, GM went all out to develop a competitive D-Segment car for the 2008 model year. The result was the 2008 Chevy Malibu, which managed to get itself named by Car and Driver magazine as one of the “10 Best Cars” for 2008.

However, when tested head to head against six other D-Segment sedans in the March 2008 issue of Car and Driver, the 2008 Malibu came in third, behind the Honda Accord and the Nissan Altima. Adjusted to the points scale that Car and Driver uses today, the 2008 Malibu scored 187 points, 6% lower than the winning 2008 Honda Accord’s 198 points.

Still, third was a respectable showing. The previous generation of the Malibu, a darling of rental car fleets, would have come in dead last in any D-Segment comparison test.

Acknowledging the importance of the D-Segment to the company’s future, GM’s CEO, Dan Akerson, ordered that the introduction of the redesigned 2013 Chevy Malibu be advanced by six months, from the fall of 2012 to the spring of 2012.

In their March 2012 issue, Car and Driver published another D-Segment comparison test, pitting the 2013 Chevy Malibu Eco against five competing vehicles. This time, the Malibu came in dead last.

Not only was the 2013 Malibu (183 points) crushed by the winning 2012 Volkswagen Passat (211 points), it was soundly beaten by the 2012 Honda Accord (198 points), a 5-model-year-old design due for replacement this fall. Worst of all, the 2013 Malibu scored (and placed) lower than the 2008 Malibu would have in the same test.

Uh-oh.

Digging deeper, the picture just gets worse. Despite its mild hybrid powertrain, which is intended to provide superior fuel economy (at the cost of a higher purchase price and reduced trunk space), the 2013 Malibu Eco delivered the same 26 MPG in Car and Driver’s comparison test as the Passat, the Accord, and the Toyota Camry.

In a recent speech, Dan Akerson admitted that GM’s powertrain technology had fallen behind that of competitors in some cases. This is illustrated by the Malibu Eco’s EPA gas mileage ratings. At 25 MPG City/37 MPG Highway, the Malibu Eco is not as fuel-efficient as the conventionally-powered 2013 Nissan Altima (27 MPG City/38 MPG Highway).

It might be possible for GM to give the Malibu a better powertrain during its five-year-product life cycle. Unfortunately, there is no way that they will be able to correct its biggest design flaw, which is its short wheelbase.

For years, automobile companies have been trying to design cars with the longest possible wheelbase (distance between the front and rear axles) for a given overall vehicle length. A longer wheelbase provides advantages in the areas of styling, ride, and legroom.

In developing the 2013 Malibu, GM decided to shorten the wheelbase by 4.5 inches from that of the previous-generation Malibu, from 112.3 inches to 107.5 inches. This gave the 2013 Malibu the shortest wheelbase in the entire D-Segment.

The Car and Driver comparison-test-winning Passat has a wheelbase of 110.4 inches, which gives it a “unique selling proposition”, the roomiest back seat in the D-Segment. The Passat has combined front and rear legroom totaling 81.5 inches, 3.5 inches more than the Malibu.

This may not sound like a lot, but, like baseball, automobile design is “a game of inches”.

For a 6’1” tall man, sitting in the back seat of the 2012 Passat behind a similar-sized driver is like sitting in a limo. His knees will be nowhere near the back of the front seat. In contrast, the same sized man would have to struggle to get into the back seat of the 2013 Malibu, and would have to sit with his legs splayed once he did.

Rear seat legroom is important in the family sedan market, not only for the comfort of adult passengers, but also for the ease of using children’s car seats. The 2013 Nissan Altima also has longer wheelbase and more rear seat legroom than does the Malibu.

Chevrolet is not a premium brand, like Mercedes or BMW. Since the 1920s, Chevy’s essential market positioning has been “more car for your money”. Unfortunately, the 2012 Volkswagen Passat is more car for the money than is the 2013 Malibu. There will not be anything that GM will be able to do about this for the next five years other than to reduce the price of the Malibu by offering “incentives”. This will eat into the company’s profitability, which is already weak.

As a company, General Motors peaked in 1965, when it commanded 50.7% of the U.S. market, and made a stunning-for-the-time $2.1 billion dollars in after-tax profits. Adjusted by the GDP deflator to 2011 dollars, GM made $12.1 billion in after-tax profits on $117.9 billion in revenue.

In 1965, Volkswagen was tiny compared to GM. It produced only 1.6 million vehicles, about 22% of GM’s 7.3 million. VW’s total revenues were only 11% of GM’s. The most powerful engine you could get in VW’s volume family car, the Beetle, had 40 horsepower. The biggest engine you could get in GM’s equivalent, the 1965 Chevy Impala, had 425 horsepower.

In the first half of 2012, Volkswagen sold almost as many vehicles as GM did, 4.6 million vs. 4.7 million. And, its total revenues were much higher, $119.2 billion vs. $75.4 billion for GM. Part of this is the result of currency exchange rates, but VW had a significantly higher operating profit margin than GM, 6.8% vs. 5.7%.

Under the leadership of Ferdinand Piech, who is kind of like a German-speaking, automobile industry version of Steve Jobs, Volkswagen is determined to become the biggest and most profitable car company in the world. And, right now, they are eating GM’s lunch.

Not only has Volkswagen taken an important share of the U.S. D-Segment with their new Passat, but they are pulling away from everyone in the troubled European market, where GM is losing money on its Opel subsidiary. The headline in the current edition of Automotive New Europe’s “Global Monthly” is, “Buried: VW Uses Europe’s Crisis to Crush Rivals”. In this case, GM is one of the “crushees”.

Will GM be able to turn itself around, and save American taxpayers from losing $26.5 billion on Obama’s bailout?

One way to answer that question is to compare the 2013 Chevy Malibu against the 2012 Volkswagen Passat, as Car and Driver did. Results: VW, first out of six; GM, dead last. However, additional insight can be obtained by looking at how GM’s CEO, Dan Akerson (63), stacks up against Professor Doctor Martin Winterkorn (65), the man handpicked by Ferdinand Piech in 2007 to be his replacement as CEO of Volkswagen AG.

Akerson has an engineering degree, but he also has a Master’s Degree in Economics, and his first big job was as CFO of MCI. Akerson was CEO of General Instrument, and then of Nextel, and then of XO Communications, which went bankrupt in June 2002. He joined the private equity firm, the Carlyle Group, in 2003.

Akerson got his first job in the automobile industry when he was named CEO of GM in late 2010. Recently, he has been hiring and firing top GM executives at an alarming pace, and he is understood to be working on a major reorganization of the company. Akerson recently gave a televised speech to GM employees on the need for “integrity”.

Martin Winterkorn has a PhD in Metallurgical Engineering, and he has spent his entire career in the automotive industry. At the 2011 Frankfurt Auto Show, Winterkorn was caught on amateur video sitting in, and studying Hyundai’s newly introduced i30, a competitor to VW’s best-selling family car, the Golf. Here is an excerpt from a story about this incident published along with the video by The Truth About Cars, an auto industry blog:

“(Martin Winterkorn) pulled on the adjuster of the steering column, and heard – nothing. At Volkswagen, there is an audible (“klonk!) feedback whenever the steering column is adjusted.

Immediately, Klaus Bischoff, head of Volkswagen Brand Design was summoned. He pulled on the adjuster: No sound. “Da scheppert nix,” exclaimed Winterkorn in his heavy Bavarian accent. “There is no rattle!”

Winterkorn was livid: “How did he pull that off?” He, the blasted Korean. “BMW doesn’t know how. We don’t know how.” He, the blasted Korean, must have found out how to battle the dreaded Scheppern.

Tension is high. This could affect careers. Someone quickly explains that there had been a solution, “but it was too expensive.” That gets Winterkorn even more enraged. “Then, why does he know how?” For less money. He, the Korean. There is no answer. Hyundai has beaten Volkswagen at the Scheppern front.

Winterkorn measures the A-pillar, runs his hands over the plastic. He walks away, his entourage trots after him. Deeply in thought and very worried.”

Uh-oh. While Dan Akerson is busy rearranging the deck chairs on GM’s Titanic, Martin Winterkorn is leading VW to world domination via technical excellence.

“The game isn’t over until it’s over”, but if President Obama wins reelection, he should probably start giving some serious thought to how he is going to justify bailing out GM, and its unionized UAW workforce, yet again. And, during the current campaign, Obama might want to be a little more modest about what he actually achieved by bailing out GM the first time.

[chiefst2000]

Don't forget the theme of the convention:

"We all belong to the government"

[MnJetFan]

The best thing is let GM go bellyup. Let competent management and have the union contract renegotiated. Get rid of GMC which is basically an over priced Chevy! Build the cars right the first time and people will buy them. A car belongs in the owners driveway not in the shop getting fixed!

[DeanPatsFan]

Originally Posted by MnJetFan

The best thing is let GM go bellyup. Let competent management and have the union contract renegotiated. Get rid of GMC which is basically an over priced Chevy! Build the cars right the first time and people will buy them. A car belongs in the owners driveway not in the shop getting fixed!

Buy a Ford...

[chesapeakejet]

Originally Posted by DeanPatsFan

Buy a Ford...

+1

[SafetyBlitz]

Romney's plan is to cut 5 trillion in taxes, raise military spending, and gut discretionary domestic spending.

That's his "fiscally responsible" plan that will help "average Americans".

[chiefst2000]

Originally Posted by SafetyBlitz

Romney's plan is to cut 5 trillion in taxes, raise military spending, and gut discretionary domestic spending.

That's his "fiscally responsible" plan that will help "average Americans".

There is no plan to cut 5 trillion in taxes. That is made up nonesense. His plan calls for revenue neutral tax reform alongside entitlement reform.

What we know with certainty is that democrats will never cut spending at all. They wont do it. The theme of the DNC convention was "we all belong to government". Their plan calls for more taxes and more spending. Obamacare carries a slew of new taxes and still runs up the deficit by almost 3 trillion in 10 years. How do you pass a new entitlement at a time when we need entitlement reform? It is counter to logic.

[SafetyBlitz]

Originally Posted by chiefst2000

There is no plan to cut 5 trillion in taxes. That is made up nonesense. His plan calls for revenue neutral tax reform alongside entitlement reform.

What we know with certainty is that democrats will never cut spending at all. They wont do it. The theme of the DNC convention was "we all belong to government". Their plan calls for more taxes and more spending. Obamacare carries a slew of new taxes and still runs up the deficit by almost 3 trillion in 10 years. How do you pass a new entitlement at a time when we need entitlement reform? It is counter to logic.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-me...an-gives-mill/

Barack Obama says Mitt Romney's tax plan gives millionaires an average tax cut of $250,000

President Barack Obama has repeatedly argued that his Republican rival Mitt Romney is pursuing policies that favor the rich. Recently, Obama offered a specific claim about how wealthier Americans would benefit from Romney’s tax plan.

In a May 5, 2012, campaign speech in Columbus, Ohio, Obama said, "My opponent won’t tell us how he’d pay for his new, $5 trillion tax cut -- a tax cut that gives an average of $250,000 to every millionaire in this country."

We wondered whether Romney’s tax proposal really would be so generous to millionaires. (The Romney campaign didn't respond to our inquiry for this story.)

First, some background on what Romney is proposing. Here are some of key elements of his plan, according to the campaign’s website.

For individuals:

• Cut marginal rates by one-fifth on a permanent, across-the-board basis
• Eliminate interest, dividend, and capital gains taxes for taxpayers with an adjusted gross income below $200,000
• Eliminate the estate tax
• Repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax

For corporations:

• Cut the corporate rate to 25 percent
• Make permanent the research and development tax credit
• Switch to a territorial tax system
• Repeal the corporate Alternative Minimum Tax

The Romney campaign's website states that lowering both individual and corporate tax rates will stimulate economic growth. High tax rates "discourage work and entrepreneurship, as well as savings and investment," the website states. "With 54 percent of private sector workers employed outside of corporations, individual rates also define the incentives for job-creating businesses. Lower marginal tax rates secure for all Americans the economic gains from tax reform."

And in a speech on March 30, 2012, Romney affirmed his plan to cut taxes for everyone: "Taxes should be as low as possible, in line with those of competing nations, and designed to foster innovation and growth. That's why I will cut marginal tax rates across the board. "

For an independent assessment of Romney’s plan, we turned to the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, a think tank that, among other things, evaluates the tax proposals submitted by presidential candidates. While judging tax proposals is subject to some degree of interpretation, the Tax Policy Center has a significant degree of respect in tax circles.

The Tax Policy Center looked at two versions of Romney’s tax proposal. We will use the analysis of the more recent of Romney’s two plans, which the group published in March 2012.

Before we look at the center’s analysis, we should note that the group ran two sets of numbers. One version, known as "current law," essentially gives Romney credit for extending the tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush and for an annual adjustment in the Alternative Minimum Tax. Under this calculation, taxpayers’ savings from these two extensions are added to the total tax cuts from Romney’s tax proposal itself.

The other version, known as "current policy," assumes that the Bush and AMT tax cuts will be extended, with or without Romney. This method only counts the taxpayer savings from the new proposals in Romney’s tax plan -- a smaller amount of tax savings than Romney would see under the "current law" calculation.

It turns out that the "current policy" calculation is the one that backs up Obama’s claim. The Tax Policy Center found that under Romney’s proposal, people with $1 million or more in annual cash income will receive an average tax cut of $250,535. Those in the millionaire category will receive an 11.8 percent increase in after-tax income, easily the highest of any income group. Collectively, the tax savings for millionaires would amount to nearly one-third of all the tax benefits that result from Romney’s plan.

The "current law" analysis shows even bigger gains for millionaires. By this method, the average tax cut for someone with cash income north of $1 million a year would be $390,876, according to the Tax Policy Center.

And the higher you go on the income scale, the bigger the tax cuts become. Under the center’s more restrictive "current policy" method, the top one-tenth of 1 percent of taxpayers -- those earning $2,868,534 a year -- would get an average tax cut of $725,716. That accounts for 19.4 percent of all the tax cuts’ benefits.

Our ruling

Even using the more restrictive of the Tax Policy Center’s two calculations, Romney’s tax plan would save millionaires almost exactly what Obama said -- $250,535. We rate the statement True.

This reliable site does not question the 5 trillion dollar figure and notes that these tax cuts are heavily slated to benefit the rich...

[southparkcpa]

Originally Posted by THE_SOOTHSAYER

GM and Bin Laden!!!

I got nothin' else.

Meanwhile, many experts think GM will be bankrupt again sometime in the next year.

Why...because there is nothing else.

[Winstonbiggs]

Originally Posted by chiefst2000

There is no plan to cut 5 trillion in taxes. That is made up nonesense. His plan calls for revenue neutral tax reform alongside entitlement reform.

No it doesn't. He sabatoged Simpson Bowles because his personal power like every other Washington official comes from their ability to legislate tax give aways in the form of deductions to their constituents. He hasn't named a single tax deduction that goes away. Without that he has no plan at all. Mortgage deductions aren't going away, charitable deductions aren't going away, farm subsidies aren't going away, deductions for dependents aren't going away. When he has the balls to put out the list of popular deductions that he is going to get rid of let me know.

Reagan, Bradley and Gephardt got it done to some extent because they were men with balls. Ryan is a tool. He, like the President were the 2 most responsible for sabatoging the only real plan to bring the budget in line.

[SafetyBlitz]

Informative video on the last thirty years of American tax policy:

[Trades]

Originally Posted by SafetyBlitz

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-me...an-gives-mill/



This reliable site does not question the 5 trillion dollar figure and notes that these tax cuts are heavily slated to benefit the rich...

So they are looking to give the tax breaks to the people paying taxes?!?! Insanity! Who do you want them to give the tax breaks to the people that don't pay any taxes but still get a "refund"?

[Warfish]

Originally Posted by Trades

So they are looking to give the tax breaks to the people paying taxes?!?! Insanity! Who do you want them to give the tax breaks to the people that don't pay any taxes but still get a "refund"?

Why isn't it rather obvious? Taxation exists to redistribute money from the wealthy (as they define it) to the poor (as they define it) via the Government, i.e. wealth redistribution.

They believe all wealth is inherantly the States, i.e. the Collectives/societies, wealth. Individuals have no inherant or basic right to the economic results of their own activities, as those activities can only occur because of the collective and State. They belive having too much wealth is evil, the State should step in, and take most of it to give it to the rest of us, providing a large and wide pool of "rights" paid for by society, with "societies" money, taken from individuals.

Basic Liberal Economic Collectivism 101.

[quantum]

Originally Posted by Warfish

Why isn't it rather obvious? Taxation exists to redistribute money from the wealthy (as they define it) to the poor (as they define it) via the Government, i.e. wealth redistribution.

They believe all wealth is inherantly the States, i.e. the Collectives/societies, wealth. Individuals have no inherant or basic right to the economic results of their own activities, as those activities can only occur because of the collective and State. They belive having too much wealth is evil, the State should step in, and take most of it to give it to the rest of us, providing a large and wide pool of "rights" paid for by society, with "societies" money, taken from individuals.

Basic Liberal Economic Collectivism 101.

Where do rich Hollywood celebutards fit into this equation?

[acepepe]

I can handle things! I'm smart! Not like everybody says... like dumb... I'm smart and I want respect!" Joe "fredo" Biden!

[PlumberKhan]

Originally Posted by quantum

Where do rich Hollywood celebutards fit into this equation?

Go ask Clint Eastwood yourself.

[SafetyBlitz]

Originally Posted by Trades

So they are looking to give the tax breaks to the people paying taxes?!?! Insanity! Who do you want them to give the tax breaks to the people that don't pay any taxes but still get a "refund"?

Again, those same folks you say don't pay actually pay state, local and sales tax.

And quite simply, when the middle class shrinks, there are more poor people that do not make enough money to pay income tax.

That's not a sign to further cut taxes, "tax the poor and lower middle class more" and gut domestic spending.

[SafetyBlitz]

Originally Posted by Warfish

Why isn't it rather obvious? Taxation exists to redistribute money from the wealthy (as they define it) to the poor (as they define it) via the Government, i.e. wealth redistribution.

They believe all wealth is inherantly the States, i.e. the Collectives/societies, wealth. Individuals have no inherant or basic right to the economic results of their own activities, as those activities can only occur because of the collective and State. They belive having too much wealth is evil, the State should step in, and take most of it to give it to the rest of us, providing a large and wide pool of "rights" paid for by society, with "societies" money, taken from individuals.

Basic Liberal Economic Collectivism 101.

That's absolutely false. We're talking about taxation and what kind of society we want to live in.

There is a fundamental problem in our society that has become increasingly apparent over the past three decades. The rich are getting richer, the wealth is becoming more concentrated and middle class wages have remained stagnant and the middle class is shrinking.

You might not see it as a problem that the top 400 richest people in America have more wealth combined than the bottom 50% - 150 million Americans combined.

400 > 150,000,000

That's not a sign of a healthy society.