Blind to Success

[kentuck]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...

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Constant repetition of anti-government rhetoric in our political echo chamber has dulled Americans into overlooking an important and perhaps surprising fact: We have just lived through one of the more notable successes of government intervention in modern times -- the auto and bank rescues that almost surely saved the country from another Great Depression.

The current state of the economy, to be sure, is nothing to celebrate, with unemployment stuck at 9.6 percent. That's why President Obama was right this week to renew his call to invest $50 billion in creating jobs, present and future, by repairing the nation's transportation infrastructure.

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Washington is such an easy target that we forget that the real villains of this story are the bankers and auto executives who steered their companies toward disaster. Rattner paints a devastating portrait, especially of GM, where top executives "seemed to be living in a fantasy that, despite the evidence of decades of decline, it was still the greatest carmaker on earth, in a class by itself." Looking back on this near-death experience of our auto and banking industries, it's clear that the successful rescues were possible only because Congress bit the bullet during the presidential transition and voted for the $700 billion pool of TARP money in the crisis months of December 2008 and January 2009. Rattner cautions: "If the task force had not been able to operate under the aegis of TARP, we would have been subject to endless congressional posturing, deliberating, bickering and micromanagement, in the midst of which one or more of the troubled companies under our care would have gone bankrupt."

President Obama and the Democrats should stop running scared on this one. The truth is that the government rescue of the auto and finance industries was a success and a necessary condition for the economic recovery that's slowly gathering steam. Stop apologizing; start taking credit for policies that worked.

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