The Impact Of General Motors

A man walks through his door and sits down at scuffed wooden table with his wife. As they sift through a mound of bills for the month the man tells his wife that he has been laid off without pay from his automotive job. Already in rough times, with money already an issue, the man must find a way to provide for his family and not have the house fall into foreclosure. The automotive industry in America controlled our economy and kept it running for many years. High gas prices ruined the industry and crippled our economy. With unemployment skyrocketing at this time due to budget cuts and layoffs people began to spend less money and it hit our economy like a hurricane and created a ripple effect. General Motors, once the mightiest company in America,

They let us prosper by making cars that society liked and so they purchased them and put the money back to circulate through our economy. McArdle states “on the rise”(1). This quotation is perfect for a company like General Motors due to the fact that that is what they always were, a company that was profitable and kept supplying jobs to a society who desperately was hungry for them at all times. This shows how powerful this company was by showing the building of new factories to keep supplying jobs to help our economy stay

GM and other companies started to become arrogant and started producing larger cars that were huge and required more money to fill up and used more gas than people in society wanted to pay for. Colin Campbell in his article “The Decline of the North American Car” states, “American cars were once the epitome of style and a symbol of industrial power. But arrogance, desperation and greed changed all that”( 1 ). This shows that the power and might of these major corporations was the ultimate downfall for these supergiants. Arrogance and greed led to the fall which followed with desperation for money and began making cars that they could make more money off of to try to recover from the loses that they were having. This was the start of the fall of General Motors and auto industry as a whole. Robert J. Samuelson in his work “How to Bail Out General Motors” states, “General Motors, once the world 's mightiest industrial enterprise”( 1 ). This was the headlines for magazines, newspapers and online articles for the failing enterprise. This was a devastating blow to our economy and to us as a society with things like layoffs and budget cuts on the horizon for this iron fist of a company. But all iron succombs to rust and begins to erode away