The Chrysler Ad

So Clint Eastwood made an ad for Chrysler that sounded to many like an ad for Obama's re-election. Yawn. Yawn. Yawn. Does it really matter?

No one who looks at the auto bailouts could ever think that Obama gets credit for doing something right here. Remember 2008? That is when the auto bailouts began. Who was president? That's right: George W. Bush. It wasn't Obama, it was Bush. If Bush gets constantly blasted by the Obamacrats for creating the economic problems that began during his term, then he should also get credit for starting the auto bailout if they were a success.

But now you need to remember 2009. When Obama took office, the debate was between sending billions of dollars to the car companies or letting them file for chapter 11 bankruptcy. Obama told us that we had to lend money to GM and Chrysler or hundreds of thousands of jobs would be lost in a bankruptcy. So we lent about another seventy billion dollars to these two companies. And what happened? GM shut down its Saturn, Pontiac and Hummer lines. It dropped about four thousand dealers with over a hundred thousand folks losing their jobs. And then GM filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy anyway. At that point, we had just what we would have had without the bailout, except that the taxpayers were now on the hook for big bucks. To make matters worse, Obama then stepped in and took control of GM and the bankruptcy process. He forced his friends in the union into a preferred position ahead of bondholders who were supposed to get preference by law. The story with Chrysler is essentially the same.

Today, the government still owns a big chunk of GM. Chrysler has paid back much of the money it got from the government, but the remainder was forgiven. That only cost us about a billion and a half dollars. GM went public again, but the price at which it was sold was not enough for the feds to get our money back, and since then, GM has not come close to being able to pay Washington back.

Meanwhile, Washington has forced GM to build idiotic cars that no one wants like the Chevy Volt. Soon enough, this car will fail and there will be no one to blame but the Washington bureaucrats who believe that they know the market better than the people who actually build and sell cars.

Obama can have credit for the auto bailouts if he wants. But it is not a credit; it is a failure. Had no one stepped in and GM had just filed in January rather than months later, we would be right where we are now with two big exceptions: the taxpayers would not be out tens of billions of dollars and GM would be able to build cars that the public wants rather than cars that the liberal bureaucrats in Washington think that they should want.