LET DETROIT GO BANKRUPT

MITT ROMNEY, OP ED, NY TIMES, Nov. 18, 2008

IF General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go  overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.

 Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will “stay the course”, the suicidal course of  declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens,  technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses.  Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.

CLICK HERE to go to the full Op-Ed piece by Romney and to readers comments from 2008

FROM THE WASHINGTON POST:

Michael Gerson
         Opinion Writer

Mitt Romney: Campaigner without a cause

 By Michael Gerson, Published: February 16

The central narrative of the Republican nomination contest is  easy to summarize: Any candidate who is perceived as the main opponent  to Mitt Romney immediately ties or leads Mitt Romney.

Rick Santorum’s surge tracks with recent precedent. His support is about the same as Rick Perry’s at his peak. A little higher than  Herman Cain’s crest. A little lower than Newt Gingrich’s pinnacle.

But Santorum is not only Romney’s latest challenger, he is the most serious

THE LINK:

Romney without a cause

Republican and former Bush aide Gerson, writing in the Wash Post, agrees with The TerryReport points:

Specific bailout policies can be disputed, but one fact cannot: No  president, Republican or Democrat, would have allowed the economic  collapse of the upper Midwest in the midst of a national economic panic. A conservatism that prefers ideology to reality is not particularly  conservative.

It seems Mitt Romney was more intent on staking out a “conservative” position in 2008, just after the presidential election, than he was in protecting his chances to run for president this year. He did an op-ed for the NY Times in which he suggested that a govt. bailout for the car companies would ruin them by allowing them to continue business as usual. This didn’t happen, of course. The auto companies were already in the process of turning themselves around when they got govt. help and the managed bankruptcies shocked them to the core.  We now have three fully functional companies, one owned by Fiat (Chysler), one partly owned by the taxpayers (GM) and one fully independent and healthy (Ford). There might have been more than one way to get where we are now, but the bailouts worked.

Romney has now changed his tune, just a bit. Here’s what he told USA TODAY:

While he doesn't agree with the process of the federal bailout, Romney  acknowledged the outcome is "wonderful. The companies now more competitive, profitable and they're adding jobs."

That statement doesn’t square, of course, with his prediction that the helping hand of Uncle Sam would ruin the car companies.  Democrats seem heavily biased in favor of government intervention, while Republicans are biased in the opposite direction: never intervene, well, except for the banks and Wall Street under G.W. Bush. When those very large chips were down, ideology had nothing to do with the decision to pump 800 billion into private markets.

We should remember historical lessons. The America of the 20th and 21 centuries was built by a lot of government help, both direct and indirect through government policies. Homesteaders were given land to settle the western states, railroads were given huge land grants in exchange for building the national railroad system. People in states like Texas, where screaming the “free market system” has apparently replaced hog calling, joined the American union mainly to get protection from American Indians. In other words, without Federal protection, Texas would have had a hard time existing at all.

The fact is, some form of an auto bailout would have been supported if the Republicans had won the White House in 2008. An America that doesn’t make cars? Left with one standing manufacturer, Ford? Not likely. Aside from the jobs and economic activity, it would have been a crushing blow to America’s morale and national sense of who and what we are. That, alone, would have set back economic recovery by years.

Doug Terry, 2.16.12

BIKE TRAILS IN THE DC AREA

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