NICHOLAS KRISTOF: A FINGER IN THE DIKE

The arguments against an auto bailout are good ones. Now ignore them.

For the first time in human history, I agree with Dick Cheney. According to The Los Angeles Times, he warned Republican senators that if they refused to bail out the auto companies, “we will be known as the party of Herbert Hoover forever.”


The senators from the Herbert Hoover Party promptly fumbled, but President Bush seems poised to rescue the car companies anyway. Thank heaven!


Look, there are plenty of sound arguments against a bailout. But there’s a practical argument that trumps everything: When conditions are so fragile, we can’t risk a staggering blow to the national economy. When you see a hole in the dike, don’t discuss the virtues of laissez-faire policies — plug it!


There were also sound arguments for not rescuing Lehman Brothers. So the government allowed Lehman to collapse — and almost everybody now recognizes that it was a mistake that cost taxpayers more than a bailout would have.


Lehman Brothers was small potatoes — a tiny french fry — compared with America’s automakers. Lehman Brothers had 25,000 employees worldwide; General Motors alone has 250,000.


The Big Three have almost 400,000 employees worldwide, including about 230,000 in the United States. In addition, several hundred thousand people make car parts for the Big Three, and a half-million more sell or distribute cars from them. All told, considerably more than 1 million jobs in the United States depend directly on the American automakers, and many more indirectly.