The Treasury Department now expects taxpayers to lose an estimated $25 billion on the auto industry bailout, but Democratic Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick flatly told The Daily Caller that he doesn’t believe the numbers.
“It’s not going to happen. The American people — all those job-holders — won because of the president’s intervention in the auto industry,” Patrick told TheDC at Hofstra University, shortly after the second presidential debate. “The leaders of the industry say that, the workers in the industry say that, the suppliers to the industry say that.”
“There were folks who said that the bank bailout, another very controversial act,was going to cost the taxpayers money. In fact, the taxpayers got a premium on that, and [got] all of their money back,” Patrick said.
Patrick went on to criticize his predecessor, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
“The notion of helping people help themselves is a philosophy of government that President Obama believes that Gov. Romney does not,” he said.
“The notion that you’d simply turn away from one of the major industries in this country, and let all of those workers go begging, is something that would’ve weighed on this president’s heart and mind, and I respect the fact that he stepped in, and I can tell you all those workers do, too.”
Patrick did, however, call Romney’s health care reform law a “great triumph” for Massachusetts, adding that he finds it “a little puzzling that Romney would turn his back on the federal health care law.”