Senate is pot to automakers' kettle
The federal budget deficit now tops $500 billion and is on its way to $1 trillion. The national debt is so huge there's no hope of ever paying it off.
And yet Congress has the gall to lecture the Big Three auto executives on fiscal responsibility.
Lawmakers who keep doling out billions of dollars in pork barrel earmarks there's no money in the budget to pay for feel perfectly comfortable instructing automakers on how to prudently manage their businesses.
It's especially ironic that this week's hearings were before the Senate Banking Committee, which failed to heed the warning signs of an imminent collapse of the financial industry. And yet the members can't understand why the automakers didn't see its current downturn coming.
Scolding Detroit for the slow response to changing markets is a lot more fun than dealing with the coming meltdown of Social Security and Medicare, two inevitable crises that Congress has ignored for decades.
You could take this bunch more seriously if they had run the federal government with anywhere near that acumen they are so shocked the auto executives lack.
But the truth is that if business CEOs signed their names to balance sheets as willfully inaccurate as the federal budget, they'd be headed off to jail.
Maybe some criticism is due the automotive leaders. Maybe a lot. But it can't be credibly leveled by senators who have led the nation to the brink of a fiscal crisis every bit as serious as the one facing the auto industry.
