Shortest Way Home, by Pete Buttigieg: on Budget & Economy

George W. Bush: 2008: $17.4B bailout for auto companies

Mike Pence: Economic development grants at regional level, not cities

True regional collaboration proactively working with other cities by sharing resources to grow the economy--was still rare in Indiana. To incentivize better behavior, the state offered a major grant for local economic development work, not to a city but to a region. In order to compete with the funding, all the counties and cities in an area would have to band together, show they could collaborate, and submit a joint application showing how they would share the funds.

Mitt Romney: 2008: auto industry bankruptcy would force modernization

Obama used it as a cudgel against his opponent, Mitt Romney, who had opined against the bailout in a 2008 op-ed entitled "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt." In 2008, that had been the safe position to take, but by 2012 voters understood that bold action had been needed. The tables had turned, and now Romney was left trying to explain away his previous view. His campaign actually tried to take credit for the bailout he had once opposed. A campaign spokesman said of the structured bankruptcy: "Mitt Romney had the idea first." To be fair, Romney was making some nuanced & sensible points in his article about the need for Detroit to modernize, but events had disproven his bottom-line 2008 prediction: "If GM, Ford & Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye."

Richard Mourdock: OpEd: 2009 auto bailout not worthwhile despite saving jobs

Mourdock simply could not accept that government getting involved could be a good thing, even if it prevented the destruction of thousands of lives. But I wonder, sometimes, whether he talked to any of the families whose livelihoods could have been wrecked by his legal adventure. Did he think about the stakes for them?

To Mourdock, it seems, the most important issue at stake in the auto rescue was that investors on the bond market would have to take a haircut. To the rest of us, the most important issue was that families lives could be ruined by the same kind of economic disaster that had nearly killed my hometown half a century earlier.