This is

This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, February 20th, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown

Profitability at the big three US.S. automakers is under stress and that means job

cuts. But what does the job picture look like for manufacturing? Dan Eekinson is a trade policy analyst

at the Cato Institute. largest ever loss by an automaker.

So they have decided that to restore profitability,

they'll offer incentives trying to convince older,

more highly paid assembly workers to retire early Ford and Chrysler are

pursuing similar tax. The idea is that foreign competition is just much more

competitive than it ever has been before. Now there is a great deal of fear

that the best US manufacturing jobs are in serious jeopardy because of that.

There is a tendency to conflate the fortunes of the big three with the fortunes of the auto industry

overall but the fact is that the US auto industry comprises GM Ford Chrysler

the big three as well as Toyota, Honda, Nissan, and European and Korean producers

now.

The U.S. Big Three have not been doing as well as those other companies, but it's not because of foreign competition per se.

It's actually domestic competition.

It's competition coming from other auto producers, foreign name plate producers, that are

outperforming the big three. One of the reasons is that the big three made a lot of

bad choices with respect to what products to produce. They were making products that Americans didn't want to consume.

They vested a lot of their production in SUVs.

And SUVs have fallen out of favor as oil prices have risen.

...