Bailout Detroit, only as part of a new Marshall Plan for the US economy by gimleteye

Back in August 2007, when I wrote Let prices fall, let markets find their equilibrium. no one had any idea how violent the economic contraction would be. We do, now.

Still, the visible hands of special interests continue to play for more time in the fields of unsustainable development (cf. Parkland DRI). Examples like Parkland-- a massive Development of Regional Impact headed to the Miami Dade County Commission for zoning approval-- show taxpayers exactly how the goal of insiders is to buy time until the economy "revives" when they intend to proceed on their merry way to doing things the same old way. (Remember, Parkland is called Parkland "2014". Its imaginators claim they will not be building anything until 2014; within a single mortgage cycle of the time when sea level rise from climate change will be a significant issue for property owners and insurers in South Florida and elsewhere.)

The Bush administration or Congress should be very careful in rushing to bailout industries that resisted economic realities for 30 years; selling instead cars, trucks, and platted subdivisions as commodities measured by weight, volume, and mass. The heavier and bigger and more saturated with add-ons, the better was how it went. No more.

The problem is: so many in positions of Congressional leadership-- take US Senator Mel Martinez, for instance-- built their entire careers on models of economic growth that are bankrupt. And the problem with bailouts, is that for all practical purposes the leadership of failed industries remains the same.

What Detroit needs today is not a bailout so much as a concrete vision assembled by the Obama administration that can be implemented as a sort of Marshall Plan: to fundamentally change transportation and our energy future. (It is not based on the combustion engine, and certainly not with ethanol; a fuel whose subsidies have wreaked havoc in the cost of food around the world. In failing to mention this today, The Herald's glowing report on Big Sugar's ethanol production today did no favors to its readers.)

Any taxpayer bailouts should be tied to close federal oversight of industries that have manifestly failed the "free" market. So far, not so good: an effect of eight years of the Bush administration has been the disappearance of talent and energy within civil service ranks.

A Marshall Plan for our transportation and energy future should be the first priority of the Obama administration; overseen by the best and the brightest we can recruit to public service. Industries that take taxpayer dollars must be kept on a tight leash until a new economic order gains traction, creating jobs and profits and economic growth based on models of sustainable development.