It appears that CNSNews.com wants to kill the U.S. auto industry just to punish its unionized employees.
A Nov. 18 article by Pete Winn quotes only opponents of a bailout, highlighting a claim by University of Michigan at Flint economist Mark J. Perry that it “costs over $73 per hour on average to employ a union auto worker.”Winn quotes Perry as saying, “Is it right to tax the average worker making $28.50 to bailout workers whose labor cost is over $73 an hour?”
Winn fails to inform his readers that Perry has a right-leaning political agenda. he is a scholar with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which Winn euphemistically calls “a free-market foundation” later in the article. On his blog, Perry has called a teacher pension plan in Michigan public schools a “pyramid scheme,” headlined one post “Socialized Medicine Can Kill You” and suggested that Barack Obama’s proposed raising of the highest marginal income tax rate from 36% to 39.6% is like a Depression-era tax hike from 25% to 79%.
A Nov. 18 article by Josiah Ryan highlights the views of “Congressmen-elect who were visiting the Capitol for freshman orientation” who oppose a bailout, at least until it’s set up in such as way that “company management and autoworker union members ought to make sacrifices in terms of pay and benefit cuts.”
Dan Gainor’s Nov. 18 CNS column is more explicit in his desire to kill the auto industry to spite the United Auto Workers:
[I]t has little to do with saving Detroit and a lot to do with helping out the Democratic Party’s political machine. The chief recipient of this deal isn’t the companies, it’s the union. A bailout of Detroit would secure that the Big Three continue to fail and pay exorbitant sums to thousands of union workers.