Great Discussion

Today I had a fun discussion with a good friend of mine via IM. While on one hand it made me sad he doesn't live in the same city as me anymore and it wasn't back to a day where we both worked at the same agency and the conversation could have been had on a couch in my office. But I digress.

The conversation was broad. It started about the economic state of the country, government and big business. We then got down to individual workers. A main part hovered around letting failing big businesses fail rather than bailing them out. This lead to a specific conversation about GM. I was saying that it's problem stem from greed at every level and to fix it could actually be a rather simple solution, but it would be a painful one, since there are too many greedy people involved. The executives are greedy and want giant paychecks, the unions are greedy and want their huge cut and the workers are greedy. When it is no longer profitable you can't expect to be so well paid to do a simple manual labor job.

So if everyone involved took some major pay cuts, and then transfered that savings to the consumer and sell a quality car for the lowest price around, more people would and could buy the car.

While this is over simplifying things, it's not far off from a reality of what could work. But the problem is no one is willing to take the hit for the greater good. They want to go on business as usual and have someone else flip the bill.

It would be the same as if I lost my income and my family and I were only willing to make a very small sacrifice. We just wouldn't be able to make it. You work with what you have.

Hard times suck. But you do what you have to do.

We also talked about personal responsibility and chances people have to make something of themselves, but going into that would make this post far too long. My opinion boiled down to, if you want something bad enough, through sacrifice and hard work you more than likely can achieve that goal.