response

You have raised some interesting points, and i agree that maybe bailing out the auto industry is not our best option. While I do not believe we should have just handed off billions of dollars to the auto industry i do think simply allowing them to wither and die would be a death nail in our economy. 

There are a few reasons why allowing the companies to die would hurt us deeply first as you have mentioned the japanese automakers have done a great job in creating efficient and cheaply produced cars, you will notice I have excluded mentioning chinese automakers, that is because there is no major chinese auto industry (toyota, nissan, honda, and Hyundai are all japanese. If we shift all of our car buying needs to foreign companies there is no difference than relying on foreign oil, we will be slowly bleeding the country of assets and create a much bigger problem in the future. 

Another point I must disagree with you on is the "reek of communism" you have mentioned. I could define communism here but I think we all know what it means, and handing money out to automakers is the exact opposite, where communism amputates any weak sector like a gangrenous limb and we are supporting companies that have simply over extended in credit. Our government will never change from democracy and at the moment democracy has decided to shell out the cash, thus we must accept this until we can vote a new power if we need to at all. 

Where I would have gone different in the bail out terms would have been a series of loans that charged interest on the companies bailed out, such that we(tax payers) as investors should see a return and the companies themselves must be more responsible with spent funds as they all must be repaid.

The deficit

 I am an accounting major, I am an American citizen, I am tired of hearing about the national debt. If you have been following the news of late you have heard of the 192 billion dollar deficit the Obama administration has racked up. While it is true that a deficit is not ideal for a national economy it is not however rare or really that important. There is a maxim along the lines of "you must spend money to make money" interesting dont you think? 

Our market economy is very complex and generally based on consumer confidence, this can make things very fickle the primary problem is that the government creates policy in order to limit or stimulate things like lending, manufacturing taxes and guidelines to raise or lower unemployment rates these are just a few of policies that effect our economy and the way our banks function. Why is this a problem? Well there is no flaw in the way our government spends to stimulate or contract monetary policy the problem arises when we try and play the government. 

The playing of our government is really when those in power or seeking power publish articles or news stories vilifying budget deficits or government spending solely to weaken consumer confidence so at election time we the people have a lesser public opinion of those currently making our policy. So what can we do? I think it is important that we look at more than just the headlines of deficit and wasteful spending, I think we need to look at where we are as a nation and where we want to be and choose leadership and policy makers based on intelligent decision rather than just transferring wealth from party to party.