Stop The Bail Outs Now

A better idea than rescuing industries is to help the people who work for them. Rather than pour taxpayer money into companies, Washington should invest in the workforce. Let's give the autoworkers extended unemployment benefits, education and training for new jobs. Let's make sure that if they are laid off, they get help maintaining their health care and pensions.

No one knows how long the recession will last or how deep it will be. But I am sure of one thing. We won't come out of it with the financial system looking like it did before the crisis, and many of our industries will be reconfigured, too. It is an understatement to say the government isn't smart enough to draw up the blueprints. It has to let the market work. Bailing out the auto companies might be good short-term politics now, but it would be lousy policy.

Garten is the Juan Trippe Professor of international trade and finance at the Yale School of Management.

© 2008