On November 3, 2012, Michael Finnegan writes in the Los Angeles Times:
In a region where hundreds of boarded-up and abandoned houses not far from the Jeep plant attest to the devastation caused by decades of manufacturing decline, few have failed to notice the rare burst of job growth at the local plants of Chrysler, General Motors and their suppliers.
For Toledo, Chrysler’s $500-million expansion of the Jeep plant means 1,100 new jobs.
Romney senior advisor Stuart Stevens said the ads were accurate. He also denied they were misleading.
Given the unique circumstances of the taxpayer bailout of Chrysler, he said, the company has an obligation to expand production in the United States for the sale of vehicles abroad, rather than following the industry practice of maximizing efficiency by building cars close to where they are sold.
“I think most people in the United States would think that that would be better,” he said.
The reality that should be understood is that Chrysler’s $500 million expansion of the Jeep plant in the United States means that 1,100 new jobs will be created. What does this translate to? If we assume the unreality that each of the 1,100 new employees will earn annual income of $100,000 from their new employment that equals $101,100 million allocated to the labor workers and $400 million allocated to new productive capital investment. The question we should be addressing is who will own the stock interests in that $400 million capital investment?
Capital acquisition takes place on the logic of self-financing and asset-backed credit for productive uses. People invest in capital ownership on the basis that the investment will pay for itself. Nobody who knows what he or she is doing buys a physical capital asset or an interest in one unless he or she is first assured, on the basis of the best advice one can get, that the asset in operation will pay for itself within a reasonable period of time––5 to 7 or, in a worst case scenario, 10 years (given the current depressive state of the economy). And after it pays for itself within a reasonable capital cost recovery period, it is expected to go on producing income indefinitely with proper maintenance and with restoration in the technical sense through research and development.
This understanding is the fundamental basis for committing loan guarantees to enable employees and others Americans to acquire private, individual ownership in new income-producing productive capital assets.
Not only should we have saved the auto industry, but we should have put in place policies to discourage out-sourcing, which virtually devastated the consumer electronics industry in the United States and other major industries and continues to do so, and incentivized new productive capital economic growth using innovation and invention in the form of human-intelligent machines, superautomation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc. with EVERY American provided an equal opportunity to acquire ownership and pay for their ownership stakes in the non-human means of production embodied in our business corporations and companies out of the FUTURE earnings of the investments.
This is the way to strengthen individuals and enable them to become self-sufficient and less dependent on the government for welfare, open and concealed. In every industry, including the automative industry, we should aim to broaden ownership simultaneously with the growth of those industries in order to eventually balance production and consumption and create a new income source for employees working in the industries and for the 99 percent.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-ohio-20121103,0,6236368.story
