Word: iacocca
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...Chrysler's bad times have firmly shoved him over toward the Democratic Party, and the prickly free-enterprise purity of the Reagan Administration has kept him there. He is a Democrat, isn't he? "Yeah, I guess I am," Iacocca told TIME, "when you put it that way--straight Democrat versus Republican. The Democrats today are more pragmatic, not so ideological...
...Iacocca has become an advocate of Government intervention in the marketplace. "I'm not very popular with the people around the White House anymore. I told them (on trade policy), 'Let's make sure we don't get hosed.' They don't like that. This Administration sees you either as a protectionist or a free-trader, with no shades in between. And we're going to lose, as a country, for it." Given the protectionism and market intervention practiced by Japan and other foreign governments, Iacocca would have Washington intervene in the market too, setting up import tariffs and quotas...
...Administration's tax-simplification plan angers Iacocca: he shouts about the provision that would abolish the tax preferences enjoyed by industry--like automobiles. "I don't see any broke-ass McDonald's out there. I don't see anybody (in services) shutting down jobs so fast you're throwing them on the dole...
Most notable, perhaps, is Iacocca's enthusiasm for "industrial policy." The idea, essentially, is for Government to engage in active economic planning: a thoroughgoing, centrally coordinated set of federal policies intended to encourage certain industries. Such planning, he writes in Iacocca, "doesn't have to mean socialism." No, but critics do not share his bouncy faith in the ability of Government to fine-tune market forces. It may be that the U.S. economy is too big and complex for such meticulous economic tinkering. Curiously, he cites the past half-century of tangled agricultural- subsidy policies as a model...
...just that sort of high-frequency rap that excites Iacocca's admirers. At a weekend-long gathering of House Democrats in West Virginia earlier this month, it was a similar talk on trade that caused a small ruckus. Iacocca's speech included a challenge to the Japanese Prime Minister concerning the U.S.-Japan trade imbalance, which rose to $37 billion last year. "Look, Mr. Nakasone," Iacocca said, "that's just too big a rip-off, even for a friend. I'm giving you (a goal) for your team: $10 billion out next year. Tell me how you get there . . . Your...