SCBIZ Daily Staff

CHARLESTON -- The day before Thanksgiving, U.S. Rep. Henry Brown, R-S.C., sent e-mail to his constituents making the case that bailing out the nation’s large automakers is a bad deal for taxpayers and sends the wrong message to foreign automakers investing in South Carolina.

Earlier in November, representatives from Ford, GM and Chrysler came to Congress asking for $25 billion without having a specific plan of how they would use the money. They were told to come back Tuesday, the same day monthly financial reports are expected to show another huge drop in sales of U.S. made vehicles.

“The three U.S. manufacturers, currently burdened with top heavy management, exorbitant and unrealistic employee salaries and benefits at all levels, and union monopolization, are unable to adjust  their product lines to meet the needs of today's consumers and were in financial crisis long before our economy took a turn for the worse,” Brown said in the e-mail.

Brown said it’s not the nation’s responsibility to fix the Big Three because they continued to agree to unreasonable union demands for wages and benefits and also relied on gas guzzling vehicles for profits when cost-conscious foreign automakers were building cars Americans wanted to buy.

“Locally, it would be hard for me to go to back to BMW, a company that announced earlier this year that, in a $750 million investment, the volume of cars exported through the Port of Charleston is expected to increase 50% to about 150,000 vehicles year, and tell them that I supported giving money to their competitors who made poor business decisions to begin with,” Brown said.

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., echoed those sentiments about foreign-owned auto plants and suppliers in South Carolina. He’s against the Democrat’s plan to carve $25 billion out of the $700 billion financial services industry bailout money.

The Center for Automotive Research, a Michigan-based nonprofit organization that conducts research and analysis of trends in the auto industry, said that a complete collapse of Detroit’s automakers would have a negative impact on foreign-owned automakers for a period of one year. CAR said that it would take that long for replacements to be found for suppliers and smaller companies that would also go out of business.

In that same scenario, CAR said that in three years, foreign-owned automakers operating in the U.S. would expand enough to absorb 20% of Detroit’s output.