If you’re bound for Congress to sing the poverty blues, it helps if you’re not traveling by multimillion-dollar corporate jet. Good God. No wonder the U.S. auto industry has the collective net worth of a roach coach in East LA. Thanks and a wink through the aviator goggles to Steve Benen at Political Animal.

Late update: I’m no economist, as Herself will be only too happy to confirm. I don’t even play one on TV. But I’m having a hard time feeling any sympathy for the Big Three automakers, who seem likely to ride their private jets back to Motor City without fat wads of the taxpayers’ cash tucked neatly away in their vest pockets.

I’ve owned exactly two American-made cars — a ’64 Chevy Biscayne, which I loved, right up to point at which I drove it into a train, and a 1996 Ford F-150, which proved so evil a vehicle that an exasperated mechanic told me, “Mr. O’Grady, you don’t need a mechanic, you need an exorcist.”

Something happened in the three decades between Biscayne and Beelzebub, and it wasn’t good. That’s why Herself drives a 2002 Subaru Outback and I drive an ’05 Subaru Forester. My ’83 Toyota 4WD is still functional, but in need of repair, which it will not get anytime soon. Even so, I’d rather push it than drive that piece-of-shit Ford.

Sure, if one, two or all three of Motor City’s titans collapse, a lot of people will be going ass-first into the blades. But they’ll have plenty of company. My own line of work, journalism, is shedding workers like a dead dog sheds fleas, and for the same reason — the folks running the show have been too busy cashing checks to come to terms with a changing world. I don’t see anyone trying to money-whip us back to solvency.