June 14, 2011 12:15PM # President Obama and the Auto Industry By [David Boaz](https://www.cato.org/people/david-boaz) --- SHARE Back from vacation, I’m catching up on things I missed last week. Dan Ikenson [did a fine job](https://www.cato.org/whitewashing-the-auto-bailouts/) on President Obama’s boasting about how he saved the automobile industry. But a few days later Glenn Kessler, the *Washington Post*’s “Fact Checker,” was [more brutal](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/president-obamas-phony-accounting-on-the-auto-industry-bailout/2011/06/06/AG3nefKH_blog.html): > We take no view on whether the administration’s efforts on behalf of the automobile industry were a good or bad thing; that’s a matter for the editorial pages and eventually the historians. But we are interested in the facts the president cited to make his case. > > > What we found is one of the most misleading collections of assertions we have seen in a short presidential speech. Virtually every claim by the president regarding the auto industry needs an asterisk, just like the fine print in that too-good-to-be-true car loan. Here’s a sample of the specific analyses: > **“GM plans to hire back all of the workers they had to lay off during the recession.”** > This is another impressive-sounding but misleading figure. In the five years since 2006, General Motors announced that it would reduce its workforce by nearly 68,000 hourly and salary workers, creating a much smaller company. Those are the figures that generated the headlines. > > > Obama is only talking about a sliver of workers — the 9,600 workers who were laid off in the fourth quarter of 2008. And that’s why President Obama’s speech was awarded Three Pinocchios. ![Media Name: pinocchio_3.jpg](/sites/cato.org/files/styles/pubs_2x/public/wp-content/uploads/pinocchio_3.jpg?itok=Wr6xkhUG) ##### Related Tags [Government and Politics](https://www.cato.org/government-politics), [Regulation](https://www.cato.org/regulatory-studies), [Trade Policy](https://www.cato.org/trade-policy), [Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies](https://www.cato.org/herbert-stiefel-center-trade-policy-studies) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).