A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you own GM

A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you own GM

There’s no question that the $50 billion spent or committed to saving what can be saved of General Motors is a lot of money.

But it is only a fraction of what has been spent bailing out Wall Street, and even if the government recoups nothing of its investment in the new GM, the $50 billion would add less than a half of a percent to the obscene national debt that has exploded over the last 25 years.

That’s a relatively small price to pay to save a national icon. And if the experiment is successful and the new General Motors starts selling new stock — which could begin as early as next year — it could turn out be a good investment.

We were opposed to the Obama administration forcing General Motors into bankruptcy court on what appeared to be an arbitrary deadline. But now that it’s done, we can only hope for the best possible outcome.

For once, the Mahoning Valley appears to have gotten a better deal than much of the rest of the nation. After a company-wide furlough planned to address an excess of inventory, the Lordstown plant will resume making its popular line of Cobalts and Pontiac G5s. And it will then transition into producing Chevrolet’s new Cruze.

Even Mahoning Valley GM dealers appear to have come out better than other areas, no doubt due to the large number of buyers here who identify with the corporation.

No guarantees

But there is no doubt that General Motors and Washington (and Canada) and the United Auto Workers are entering uncharted waters. Even the apparent success of Chrysler’s well orchestrated bankruptcy is not a guarantee that GM’s reorganization is going to be as uneventful.

It’s not as if there were no losers and that there could yet be glitches in the Chrysler restructuring — just ask the hundreds of dealers who maintain that they were treated unfairly, unethically or even illegally.

General Motors Corp. will permanently close nine more plants and idle three others to trim production and labor costs. Each of those plants is in a community that will feel varying degrees of pain from those closures.

It is not difficult for residents of the Valley to empathize. We’ve seen the effects of cutbacks over the years at General Motors facilities here, and we know what it does to the local economy, to real estate markets, to the tax base and to charitable organizations. We can imagine what the effect could have been here if labor and management had not made the decision years ago to reinvent Lordstown as a plant where changes were made and better cars are built.

The next 60 to 90 days will be critical in demonstrating whether GM’s reorganization can be pulled off as seamlessly as the administration has envisioned. But it will be years before the new corporation is firmly defined and established and decades before we know whether the restructuring of Chrysler and GM has produced companies that can compete in the world market and at home — and stem the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs.