jfnance32,

I've read many of your posts and all I can do is shake my head and pray for you. What a miserable, unhappy person you must be.

How about the shamefully low mining tax? Or the lowest-in-the-country gaming tax? Considering the billions of dollars these industries pull in while using the state's resources, they are far from paying their fair share.

Key words: skilled, educated labor. The casinos prefer employees that aren't. Not only are they less expensive, but they don't/can't do critical thinking so it's easier to treat them as poorly as they do while telling them how they're valued. As long as we continue to kowtow to gaming, we will never be competitive. Oh, and the over-the-top corruption in both business and government doesn't help either.

Beautiful. Republicans blaming labor. Who would have thunk it?

Labor is a small piece of the cost of a car. How about executive compensation? Everyone from Level 8 (2nd level supervisor) and up gets a company car with gas and repairs paid for. And for 6-8 weeks every year, they gave thousands of employees new model year company vehicles (with free gas) to drive for a week. Wanna bet how many of them made that 600 mile round-trip to Chicago for the weekend?

How about the go-with-the-flow management with umpteen levels of approval required to get anything done? The way you got moved up at GM was by not making waves.

(I used to work in EDS management at GM in Detroit. If you recall, GM bought EDS from Ross Perot and was a wholly owned subsidiary with people embedded at every GM location across the globe. When you manage IT systems, you come to intimately know a company's business model and business processes. I worked directly with high level management and did stints at Cadillac, Chevrolet, and corporate so I have first-hand knowledge of their vehicle engineering, manufacturing engineering, sales, service, marketing, and headquarters support functions.)

Gotta love the term "win".

KDR81, get a life.

Looks like the multiplication factor might even be larger. I just found the following from Time:

"Although the Detroit Three directly employed about 240,000 people last year, according to the industry-allied Center for Automotive Research (CAR) in Ann Arbor, Mich., the multiplier effect is large, which is typical in manufacturing. Throw in the partsmakers and other suppliers, and you have an additional 974,000 jobs. Together, says CAR, these 1.2 million workers spend enough to keep 1.7 million more people employed. That gets you to 2.9 million jobs tied to the Detroit Three, and even if you discount the figures because of CAR's allegiance, it's a big number. Shut down Detroit, and the national unemployment rate heads toward 10% in a hurry.

The problem is that for every auto industry job lost, 4 more are lost in the ripple effect. When GM laid off 29,000 after closing multiple plants in the 80's, the total impact was nearly 150,000. With over 100,000 employees, a GM bankruptcy alone would cost over half a million jobs. Add GM and Chrysler and the results would be devastating. Of course, once you add life support, you have to treat the patient and then be compensated as well: curb executive pay and corporate excess, taxpayers get a piece of the action. We're all in this together. The Las Vegas economy depends on having a healthy national and global economy. What do we do when no one has enough disposable income to travel here and spend money?

I'd like some of what joncmac's been smoking. The figures just came out: our government's "HOPE for Homeowners" program has helped 42 homeowners to date. Yes, that's right. 42. The "commitments" to help that are being tossed out by these corporations and our government are nothing but window dressing. The only mortgages that can be helped are those that have remained whole and weren't securitized. If your mortgage was securitized, it may now be owned by 10 different entities, any one of which can gum up the works by refusing to participate in the re-write. Someone is blowing smoke...