by Rene Pharisien

Created on: November 21, 2008   Last Updated: September 24, 2011

The auto industry is pushing for a bailout and asking the American taxpayer for $34 billion in loan guarantees, arguing they can't survive without it. If we agree then we should also bail several others:

1. Starbucks. If they can no longer sell $4 coffee because of something as trivial as people being unemployed, then it's back to the way coffee used to taste decades ago, and nobody wants that. For less than $1 billion a year, the taxpayer could help Starbucks continue their expansion into exotic places like Laundromats, gas stations, and the empty lobbies of investment banks and hedge funds.

2. Toll Brothers and Kaufman & Broad. What if the builders go under? We can't afford to lose the whole industry, where would we live? What if a million aliens invade the planet and need a place to stay? They must continue building houses, we can help them with less than $10 billion.

3. Sun Microsystems, to save the 8,000 job cuts just announced. They are getting hammered by new competitors that came out of nowhere, Amazon, Yahoo and Google, who now sell something called "cloud computing", which I think is excess computer capacity dumped on the market at a fraction of the cost? Totally unfair. Sun invented Java for God sake; send a few billion dollars their way.

4. My country club. Do you have any idea how hard it is to sell $200,000 memberships in this environment? The members are real good guys and could use the money. In the scheme of things, we'd preserve a national landmark for under $10 million.

Are GM, Ford and Chrysler the auto industry?

Although Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi concedes the automakers may not be well managed companies, she says we can't let them die because without them we would have no auto industry. Really? Let's think about this for a second.

So GM, Ford and Chrysler represent a large segment employing 230,000 workers. How about the "other" auto industry outside of Detroit, the thriving assembly plants in the Carolina's, Kentucky and Alabama that employ 130,000 people, and make BMW's, Toyota's, Honda's and Nissan's? And the new technology car makers sprouting in California, Fisker Automotive, Tesla Motors, Phoenix Motors and Aptera who make hybrids that get 130 mpg and all-electric vehicles with a 250 mile range?

What happens without a bailout?

The auto industry and Congress need to take a page from high tech. There an entire life cycle may be as short as 12 years, you adapt or die, and there are no bailouts. In the late 80's, the "computer"

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