Letter to the Editor

No one made you buy

Monday, July 21, 2008

Dear Editor,

Gee, I never saw anything on the news about those big, bad American car companies forcing people to buy 8-mile-per-gallon SUVs. I guess I misses that or maybe it was because people voluntarily brought them. After reading several articles over the weekend about how everyone from Barack Obama to the cleaning lady is mad at domestic auto makers, I thought some reflection might be appropriate.

First, Americans need to take responsibility for their own decisions: No one made you buy an SUV. You bought it, for whatever reason, of your own free will. Now, with gas prices heading into never-never land, all of a sudden the U.S. auto industry is to blame? And what is everyone's response? "Let's abandon those evil domestic gas guzzlers and jeopardize 13 million American jobs by paying full list for a foreign car." Gosh, that will really help our ailing economy. Nothing like another 13 million unemployed Americans.

Ford, GM and Chrysler have been building economical cars all along. Nobody bought them. Now GM is gearing up to build the economical Cobalt/G5 cars 24 hours a day to meet demand. Ford has increased production of the world-class Focus by 30 percent to meet demand. In truth, GM has build more 30-plus mpg cars for years than Honda and Toyota. The Ford Focus gets better mpg than most imports.

Let him (or her) who is without an SUV cast the first stone, and if there is a shred of patriotism left in you, use it to support our own industry, not Japan's.

Jim Brasfield

Collierville