The president will be going to a Chrysler plant in Toledo on Friday in the wake of Chrysler’s announcement that it is paying back its government loan. Earlier in the month, GM announced it will invest $2 billion in the United States, “preserving or creating” 4,000 jobs at 17 facilities in eight states. The company claims to have invested another $3.4 billion since mid 2009.
It has had five consecutive quarters of profitability, making $3.2 billion in the first quarter of this year alone, its best quarter in a decade.
In anticipation of the president’s visit, Ohio Sen. Rob Portman was asked about his view of the bailout. He said he opposed it because it entailed the closing of plants in Parma, Mansfield and Columbus. He said it was a bad deal for Ohio. He said he’s been consistent over time.
He added: “Look, I’m delighted to see the auto industry is starting to make a comeback. I think it’s good for our state. But I do think that the bailout could have been better for Ohio.”
It’s an interesting position. Much of the opposition to the bailout was based on principle: The government should not be bailing out private companies, especially those that had been run badly, as so many believed about the Detroit-based car companies.
People said the government has no business being in the marketplace and intruding into business decisions that should be made on the basis of business considerations, not political ones.
But Sen. Portman — then not yet in the Senate — thought they should be made on the basis of fairness to his state.
True, the business decisions that were made were brutal. But just about everybody was saying that GM simply had to make some tough decisions it had been dodging. In business terms, those decisions are looking pretty good now, leaving the company putting out products it can actually sell.
Some people will never be reconciled. They worry legitimately about setting a bad example, about making government bailouts an option in the future. And they worry legitimately about a double standard between corporations that are considered “too big to fail” and everybody else in the business world.
Nobody who favored the bailout was indifferent to those concerns. Nobody thought that what this county needs is more bailouts or the government owning a car company. But there was a particular crisis to deal with.
In the end, a lot of endangered people in and near the auto industry were saved a lot of economic travail. So was the Midwest as a region.
The president took the big risk of looking very bad if the American auto industry continued to fail and if the federal money just delayed its demise in a very expensive way.
Some people thought that a bailout would be throwing good money after bad. Under the normal rules of politics, those who thought the opposite have a right to a little tasteful gloating.
Cox News Service