First Bankruptcy, and Then a Possible Bailout (NYT)

Edward Glaeser, an economist at Harvard, has a good look in the NY Times at the options facing the auto industry and possible ways forward.

Highlights below, full article here.

---------------
Should we be using tax dollars to keep workers from heading to more productive companies? It would have been madness a century ago to tax Henry Ford and Ransom Olds to prop up the declining horse-and-buggy industry.
...
How can we take a hard line against the car industry that employs hundreds of thousands of middle-income Americans while we spend billions to keep Wall Street working? Detroit’s boosters argue that simple fairness and the long-run strength of the country imply that blue-collar assembly-line workers deserve as much help as Hermès-wearing financiers.
The difference between TARP and aid to General Motors is that TARP is not an attempt to prop up an industry that has been declining for decades.
----------------