We realize that helping Detroit involves big risks. After bailing out the financial system, it will encourage other companies to seek sustenance at Washington’s trough. Washington will have to learn to say no. But at this juncture, Detroit is too big to allow it to fail. And who knows? It may learn to survive.

i disagree with this

saving the financial system is to me about saving the infrastructure of the economy but Detroit is a different animal. If large US car manufacturers go to the wall then it would create severe economic pain and particularly hit blue collar workers but whilst it seems harsh to save certain white collar workers and let blue collar workers go to the wall I think that ultimately is a sentimental argument (and it suddenly occurs to me as funny how this is soviet socialist iconography and how the republicans with their Joe the Plumber stuff have appropriated soviet imagery). There has to be a line in the sand and to me the government intervening to bail out sectors of the economy is justified when those sectors are integral parts of the economic infrastructure but otherwise it isn't. Otherwise it really is, maybe not the road to socialism, but just delaying the inevitable economic reckoning. In the UK in the 1970s the government owned and ran the trains, the telephone network, the coal and steel industries, the energy companies, the water companies, and certain car manufacturers et al. Then came the 1980s and privatisation and now coal, steel and car manufacturing has gone and of the rest what is left; mostly energy, water and telephone companies, has been rationalized and is often foreign owned. I say don't waste tax payers money delaying the inevitable. It is a siren song: save jobs, too big to fail, but where do you stop and how far does the pendulum swing. There is a definite place for market discipline. Bail outs don't save communities of hard working people but just gives them false hope and that perhaps proves the cruelest blow. In the UK the privatisation that inevitably came was no soft landing for the blue collar communities.