NYT: A Million Jobs

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A Million Jobs
Published: February 25, 2012


The American economy was terrifyingly close to the brink in 2008 and 2009, and the impending collapse of General Motors and Chrysler threatened to be the final push. When the companies begged the federal government to save them from financial catastrophe, President George W. Bush and later President Obama ignored strong Republican objections, saving a signature American industry and the whole country from an even deeper crash.

Four years later, there are 1.45 million people who are working as a direct result of the $80 billion bailout, according to the nonpartisan Center for Automotive Research, both at the carmakers and associated businesses downstream in the economy. Michigan’s unemployment level is at its lowest level in three years. G.M. is again the world’s biggest automaker, and both companies are reporting substantial profits.

And yet Mitt Romney, along with the other Republican presidential candidates, has spent the days before the Michigan primary denouncing the bailout that has rescued his native state. Mr. Romney has been especially vociferous in his insistence that he would have allowed the carmakers to go bankrupt, and said he believes they could somehow have clawed their way back to profitability without a dollar of federal assistance.

“The president tells us that without his intervention things in Detroit would be worse,” he wrote recently in The Detroit News. “I believe that without his intervention things there would be better.”

This critique is detached from reality. Steven Rattner, who was Mr. Obama’s lead auto adviser, wrote in The Times on Friday that not a single dollar of private capital could be found to prop up the companies, despite desperate efforts, and he challenged Mr. Romney to name one investor who might differ. The Detroit News, which otherwise enthusiastically endorsed Mr. Romney in the primary, said he was dead wrong about the bailout. Only the government was in a position to save the auto industry from “the darkest hour of its history,” the newspaper’s editorial board wrote.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/a-million-jobs.html?_r=1&ref=opinion