I've Now Thanked Obama Twice This Week

This is shrewd, in my opinion: (via The Carpetbagger Report)

Trying to jump-start gains in auto fuel efficiency after decades of inaction, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., is proposing an unusual swap for the Big Three U.S. carmakers: Washington would pay some of Detroit's multibillion-dollar health costs in exchange for it making cars that get higher gasoline mileage.

The federal government would pay 10 percent of the $6.7 billion in annual health costs for retirees that are weighing down General Motors, Ford and Chrysler if they'll commit to building more fuel-efficient cars, Obama proposed in a speech Tuesday before a panel at the National Governors Association conference. He called it a "win-win proposal for the industry."

Normally I'd be against corporate welfare, but this is responsible corporate welfare (if there is such a thing) because 1) we get tangible benefits in the energy and environmental sectors in return, 2) we start to chip away at the notion that companies can shoulder the burden of soaring health care costs and remain competitive globally. It's simply not the case. GM has plenty of problems (a failure to innovate beyond the SUV in recent years being the big one) but the main drag on their bottom line right now is that they've become a giant HMO. The benefits they gave their workers at the time were sensible, but the rising costs soon made them ridiculous. And a single-payer health care system is the only way for them to compete, to say nothing of it being a moral imperative.

This is an incremental proposal, asking for CAFE standards to only rise 3% by 2008. But it's a start, everybody gets something they want, and the benefits far outweigh the costs. And, it puts us on the path to the right solution for the broken health care system.