Is General Motors Worth Saving?

If General Motors fails, the impact would be huge.

FROM CNN’s Jack Cafferty:

As GM goes, so goes the nation…That’s the old motto anyway. Financially neither one is looking so good right now. And General Motors, along with Ford and Chrysler, is looking for some help from our already cash-strapped government to get back on track. Estimates are if the Big Three go belly up, unemployment could hit 10 percent.

But doubts about a bailout for the auto industry grew yesterday on Capitol Hill as Democratic leaders conceded they don’t have the votes to get a measure through in next week’s lame duck session.

If General Motors fails– and it would likely be the first of the Big Three to fall because Ford is in better shape and Chrysler is a much smaller company– the impact would be huge. It’s not just the hundreds of thousands of jobs at GM that would be lost, it’s literally thousands of smaller companies all over the country that sell their products to GM. It’s highly likely many of them would fail as well.

As Time Magazine’s Bill Saporito put it quote, “The decision that Washington has to make is whether we pay for G-M’s survival or for its funeral.”

Because whether G-M gets help from the government or not, as taxpayers, we are on the hook. We’ll have to cover everything from lost tax revenues and higher unemployment costs to G-M’s hefty pension obligations.

Here’s my question to you: Is General Motors worth saving?

READ MORE AT <http://caffertyfile.blogs.cnn.com/2008/11/14/is-general-motors-worth-saving/>