Obama Moving Towards A Sensible Policy on GM?

This actually sounds like they’re moving in the right direction:

But after careful analysis, we have determined that neither goes far enough to warrant the substantial new investments that these companies are requesting. And so today, I am announcing that my administration will offer GM and Chrysler a limited period of time to work with creditors, unions, and other stakeholders to fundamentally restructure in a way that would justify an investment of additional tax dollars; a period during which they must produce plans that would give the American people confidence in their long-term prospects for success.

Someone over there is making sense.

I have to give Obama a lot of credit here, because I’m not sure Bush or McCain would have done this. His rhetoric tends to suggest his team may be starting to understand that GM needs a bankruptcy restructuring. This sounds a lot like a managed bankruptcy,

Now, of course, the devil will be in the details. One might be skeptical that a government-mediated bankruptcy is going to be anything but a taxpayer-financed transfer of wealth to political interests, rather than a real plan for profitable operation. The two are obviously to some extent mutually exclusive. But on the whole I agree with Henry Payne over at The Corner:

Suddenly, improbably, the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry has put Detroit’s biggest auto company on a path towards a public debtor-in-possession bankruptcy (a move long advocated by NRO, GOP Senator Bob Corker, and many of the country’s top bankruptcy lawyers) and a chance to emerge from the current financial crisis as a viable, equity-building enterprise.

The bottom line is this: Free markets must have winners and losers. You can’t have the winners without the losers. We can’t have companies that are “too big to fail” or we risk becoming a stagnant economy like Europe. It is not coincidence that Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. are all American companies; European countries have erected enormous barriers to entry and competition to protect their large companies.