Detroit is back!

On Saturday I started a new segment on here (You have got to be kidding me?! Mitt Romney) talking about how Mitt Romney tried taking credit for the auto bailout working. Well, the bailout did work and the sales numbers for the month of May prove that. However, note that the earthquake in Japan in March did have an effect on sales too as Honda and Toyota took a huge hit with factories being down and supplies running low. For the month of May, General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler took the top three spots for sales, the Detroit Three are once again the Big Three. General Motors sold 221,192 vehicles, Ford sold 192,102 vehicles, and Chrysler sold 115,363 vehicles. GM and Ford led the all important segments of compact and midsize cars with the Cruze, Focus, Malibu, and Fusion. It's hard to tell whether Chrysler can keep it up once Honda and Toyota get back up to full production. But for now, we can celebrate our auto industry.

On another note, Detroit is still adding jobs, as shown by the chart below the White House released today.

The article went on to say:

In the year before GM and Chrysler filed for bankruptcy, the auto industry shed over 400,000 jobs. Had President Obama failed to intervene, conservative estimates suggest that it would have cost at least an additional one million jobs and devastated vast parts of our nation’s industrial heartland. Since GM and Chrysler Group emerged from bankruptcy in June 2009, the auto industry has added 115,000 jobs – the fastest pace of job growth in the auto industry since 1998.

Since GM and Chrysler emerged from bankruptcy in June 2009, they have announced investments totaling over $8 billion in their U.S. facilities, creating or saving nearly 20,000 jobs. Additionally, in the first quarter of 2011, the auto industry reached an important milestone when all three Detroit automakers posted positive quarterly net profits – for the first time since 2004.

Needless to say, the auto industry is back in full swing again and if the president hadn't intervened and bailed them out, it would have had devestating effects on our economy. Unlike the banks, they truly were too big to fail.