With the auto bailout redux upon us, the grandstanding, like Citigroup stock, is reaching new lows. Execs hitchhiking to DC, Senator's extolling free market virtues and talking heads making ridiculous arguments. Today on CNBC Mo Francis had on a few guests to discuss the pressing question of 'to give or not to give'. The bowtied gentleman's (I didn't get is name) argumentation against the bailout is paraphrased as such: ...there is some waitress scraping by, waiting tables for $6 per hour at a diner in California. Why should we give her tax dollars to Detroit so that they can continue overpaying the unions to sit around.
First it's perfectly plausible that said waitress sees the connection between Detroit and her job, and thus is for the bailout, in which case he is now as well, based on his argument. Second since a dollar of tax revenue is the same regardless of the source, her fictionalized struggle is ad hominem at best, only inserted to appeal to emotion and thus wholly irrelevant, making the argument as such too. Lastly, and I've addressed this before, anyone blaming the unions is simply blowing smoke. The unions signed a contract to trade labor for money. Whoever agreed to pay them should draw conservative ire, not unions.
On another note, it's pretty clear the waitress is a smokescreen. What he's really concerned with is the allocation of upperclass (his) tax dollars to Detroit a.k.a the unions a.k.a working class, as he sees it. For him this is some form of nefarious wealth redistribution, one that doesn't redistribute to his own pockets which means that it cannot be tolerated.
