Congressman & Chevy Dealer Introduces Bill To End EV Tax Credit

I don't doubt that Victor Posner did bad things to Sharon Steel, but he is not responsible for the dramatic changes in the entire domestic steel industry. That was caused by decades of underinvestment in new processes and equipment that was supported by both management and labor for various reasons. That worked until foreign competitors (particularly Japan) got back on their feet and began offering better products at lower cost in the 1970s. That problem was FAR bigger than Victor Posner, and it didn't just affect Sharon Steel. It was the same story with the auto industry, tire industry and heavy equipment industry. The problem wasn't "greedy investors," it was management and labor milking the same old cow until it was dry, and ignoring what customers wanted. Meanwhile, the United States still ranks among the top three nations in steel production, and manufacturing's share of our gross national product has remained the same for decades. The idea that "we don't make anything anymore" is a myth. A lot of the old-line, unionized dinosaurs went away. But the air is clean now in Pittsburgh, and it's more of a research and technology center, and a much nicer place to live, as well. Changes happen, and life goes on...

@geeber Sharon Steel wasn't like the rest of the dinosaurs. It was the most modern steel mill in America at the time. It was the first to bring in Kaldo basic oxygen furnaces, first with continuous strip rolling mill. It made high strength alloy steels, stainless steel, and even had a titanium mill. Victor Posner took it over because it was a profitable company with low debt and undervalued stock. He then set up a warehouse a few miles down the road, where he stored the steel he had sold to himself cheaply and then resold at market value, thus siphoning capital out of the company and into his own pockets. My father was a craneman loading the trucks going to the warehouse. We tend to think of the 50s and early 60s as some norm that we have been drifting away from, but it was that post-war period that was the aberration. America came out of WW II with most of its infrastructure intact, resulting in America having over half the world's manufacturing capability. This was an unsustainable percentage. Over time, war zone nations rebuilt with new technology while America continued to coast with its old stuff. Three decades ago, Lester Thurow discussed this in Zero Sum Society. The combination of manufacturing strength, powerful industrial unions, confiscatory taxation to pay down the war debt and build public infrastructure, and government investment in education and research created the conditions which allowed the middle class to grow rapidly. For 25 years after WW II, wages and benefits increased in step with productivity gains. Wages decoupled from productivity around 1970, followed 10 years later by benefits. Since then, 90% of the value added by productivity improvements have been absorbed by the richest Americans. The implication of all this for this website is that the middle class no longer has the income to blow a lot of money on new cars. The Volt subsidy is a tempest in a teapot. The bigger issue is that by increasing the income gap between the very rich and the rest of us, money is drained out of the general economy and is put into financial speculation which produces no new wealth. The result is a downward spiral. Victor Posner is important because he was one of the first individuals exhibiting the behavior that has now become a trend: the winner take all society.

+1 - As someone who worked at US Steel's Homestead works for the first 8 years of my employment, I would say that the decline of the basic (not specialty) steel industry was fueled by greed on both sides of the equation: US Steel was making fantastic profits in facilities which were upgraded by the government for the War effort that US Steel bought for pennies on the dollar, and the U.S.W. fought hard in the 50's to get a piece of that profit. This, along with more stringent pollution control standards of the 60's set the stage for US Steel to build plants in Brazil, Europe, Asia, etc. rather than investing in newer, cleaner technologies here (The "Bop Shop" in Braddock, PA being an exception, but it came far too late). The early 80's it all started to go downhill; Now the Homestead Works (which employed 4,000 in its heyday, and several surrounding towns that were built on middle-class wages) has become a shopping center, and the towns around it have fallen into decay and crime. A less adversarial attitude of both the Company and the Union could have (at least in part) preserved a leaner, cleaner domestic steel industry, but the reality is that neither side was willing to budge, because it meant compromise (in the form of losses on both sides) that would not happen due to lack of forethought, pride and stubbornness. I dare say that the present political climate that pits Americans against each other mirrors the basic steel story, and we don't learn anything from "selective" history.

fred schumacher: "Mike Kelly is a Republican Congressman, a member of a party whose theme song is, “We don’t care what the President has to say. It makes no difference anyway. Whatever he’s for, We’re against it.” Such as health care reform, which was patterned on ideas first proposed by the conservative Heritage Foundation, in similar form was signed into law in Massachusetts by Republican Governor Mitt Romney, who now disavows any connection to his own ideas when they are adopted by a Democrat." Whenever anybody I'm acquainted with lost their job (and this was happening with depressing regularity over the last couple of years) and the incident comes up for discussion, one of the first things I hear from people, whether Republican or Democrat is, "what about his healthcare?" And, yet, a good chunk of the nation loathes Obama (or is being whipped into an Obama-loathing frenzy) for actually doing something to ensure people don't have to worry about whether or not they can get care. Cognitive dissonance, much?