Totaled?

By Patrick Appel
The Economist joins auto bailout debate:

The worst sort of bailout would just postpone the inevitable, using tax dollars to buy time without extracting the improved management and labour practices needed to make the Big Three (or some combination of them) genuinely competitive. Far better would be an approach that results in the carmakers having costs more like those of Japanese and South Korean firms, which will mean getting concessions from the unions similar to what Chapter 11 would have forced on them. One interesting idea is for the government to guarantee existing pension promises to workers and retirees in exchange for the unions agreeing to huge job cuts. The pill might also be sweetened with generous unemployment benefits (say for a couple of years) for those let go.