As Mitt Romney continues to insist that President Obama saved the auto industry wrong and he, Mitt, would have done better, the Obama administration has a simple rejoinder:
The facts:
- "More than 1.1 million jobs saved in 2009, more than 310,000 jobs saved in 2010, and nearly $97 billion in personal income losses prevented"
- "21.8 percent of Michigan’s workforce is supported by the auto industry"
- "1 in 25 American jobs rely on a healthy auto industry"
- "All outstanding loans have been repaid to the federal government"
And the auto industry expects to add 167,000 jobs by 2015, and GM was the world's biggest automaker in 2011. Not bad for a supposedly botched rescue, right?
Of course, Romney would look at that chart and those facts and grit his teeth in rage and frustration that many of those jobs continue to be union jobs, and tell you about how much better it all would have been if workers had made even more concessions than they did—if they had lost their pensions and health care, had their wages cut until their families were cut entirely out of the middle class—how much better it would have been if their unions had been broken, if in every way auto workers had been squeezed for every last cent of profit and treated as disposable. That would be the auto industry jobs chart to make Mitt Romney smile. But it wouldn't be so good for the rest of us.