President Barack Obama greets workers during a shift change at the Wrangler Paint Facility at Chrysler Group’s Toledo Supplier Park complex in Toledo, Ohio, June 3, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)
Today, President Obama travelled to Toledo, Ohio where he toured the Chrysler Group Toledo Supplier Park and spoke with employees there about the tough decision he made in 2009 to support the restricting of the company rather than allowing it to fail.
Now, we had a few options. We could have followed the status quo and kept the automakers on life support by just giving them tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money, but never really dealing with the structural issues at these plants. But that would have just kicked the problem down the road.
Or we could have done what a lot of folks in Washington thought we should do, and that is nothing. We could have just let U.S. automakers go into an uncontrolled freefall. And that would have triggered a cascade of damage all across the country. If we let Chrysler and GM fail, plants like this would have shut down, then dealers and suppliers across the country would have shriveled up, then Ford and other automakers could have failed, too, because they wouldn’t have had the suppliers that they needed. And by the time the dominos stopped falling, more than a million jobs, and countless communities, and a proud industry that helped build America’s middle class for generations wouldn’t have been around anymore.
So in the middle of a deep recession, that would have been a brutal and irreversible shock to the entire economy and to the future of millions of Americans. So we refused to let that happen.
Fonte: White House