On yesterday’s Your World, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder was asked by Neil Cavuto about Mitt Romney closing the polling gap in Michigan in spite of the fact he opposed the auto bailout. “The knee jerk reaction is that those in your state would be very sore about Mitt Romney’s opposition to that auto bailout. Yet he seems to be faring OK. Why is that?” Neil asked.
Snyder replied, “If you think about it, Neil, the auto bailout I think is overblown in terms of how big an issue it has become, and I’ve said that from the start. The citizens of Michigan, their main concern is more and better jobs today and in the future… The auto bailout is something that was done, it’s over with, it worked, let’s move forward.”
Right. The bailout is overblown, yet he said it worked. It’s overblown in his mind because a Democratic President succeeded in making it work.
Cavuto, of course, didn’t dwell on the positives. He asked, “Do you think some of them are chafing a little bit, that they thought things would have been rosier post-bailout, and now they’re finding out the hard way... it was really a taxpayer-funded bankruptcy where plants were shut down and people did lose their jobs and they’re still burnt?”
Synder said, “The only time I get a question about the bailout is from the national media.”
”When you’re on shows like mine,” Cavuto quipped.
Snyder said, “Government’s role is not to create jobs, it’s to create an environment for jobs to flourish.”
As Cavuto and Snyder must surely know, since emerging from bankruptcy, GM and Chrysler have created 115,000 jobs, and the Big 3 automakers have returned to profitability. Cavuto and the Governor didn’t mention the positives of the auto bailout even though Snyder admitted it worked
Which is, I believe, precisely the position of President Obama when he says that successful businesses can only rarely – if ever – claim to have done everything on their own. An “enabling environment” means good infrastructure, both physical (roads, power grids, water and sewerage systems) and non-physical (good schools, opportunities for skills upgrading, affordable health care and a huge majority of ordinary people with money to spend.
The rich are wont to stash their cash away in financial instruments or – worse – in offshore bank accounts in order to avoid having to pay US taxes. Most of that money is not even on their books (although it should be). It’s not that money that is creating jobs or building any infrastructure within the USA.
rMoney will help the economy a lot with more monetary speculation. Unfortunatly it won’t help anyone below the Fabulous 1%, but it will make great reporting for Bank Profits which Fux Nuze will call a winning policy.