Chronicle-Tribune
As we have said, General Motors is family.
GM has been a major part of our local history for more than 50 years, and it is bound to mean a lot to our future, whatever the course of the company.
For this reason, we support a common sense effort to help GM and to spare Grant County.
GM-made prosperity still flows through its threatened manufacturing facilities, including ours.
We believe controversy over the corporation's much-anticipated demise, and opposition for the federal government to do something to save it, takes into account many principled arguments but not always real-world impact. Certainly, the sure economic suffering that would come from the disappearance of GM would not be felt evenly by everyone, everywhere.
In our community, the Marion plant has an estimated $75 million payroll and provides about 1/15th of the county's tax base. It is an economic engine that might have reduced its size over the years but continues to provide a pillar for our quality of life, including the quality of our city schools.
We live in a place where the pain of the end of GM would arrive with the impact of a sledgehammer.
If the company goes out of business, Grant, Howard, Allen and Madison counties, where so many retirees continue to supply economic growth, would be profoundly changed. Those who might drive a Toyota, work at a college and live on the edge of Grant County far from the plant might think they are immune from a meltdown of GM. We believe they would become poorer in a real way if GM departed this world.
Some are philosophically opposed to federal intervention in free markets; we generally agree. But we also know there are common sense exceptions - including some farm price supports, tax credits and the current effort to restore strength to the financial industry that keeps the rest of the economy in motion. We should remember this was tried and worked before. In the last century, Chrysler was bailed out by the federal government. Those loans were repaid in full and at a quicker pace than required.
We support the Democratic leadership in Congress, which is requiring the Big Three to come back with a plan for their survival next month. If it is a credible plan, we believe Congress should help our domestic auto industry become stable.
As we have written, we do not believe our community would truly be aided by a bailout that would only briefly delay the inevitable decline of the automotive giants. If there is no coherent and workable plan for the Big Three's survival, the next move by the government needs to be aimed at helping workers and communities abandoned by the business loss.
We also understand the visceral outrage to seeing auto executives parade before Congress, having just gotten off their private planes, to ask for tax money to help them out of trouble - trouble largely resulting from their decisions.
We share that response.
But when our heads clear, we realize that people at the top of the Big Three are likely to remain financially secure no matter what Congress decides. They are not the ones needing rescue.
We are.