Obama Administration Auto-Jobs Numbers: 76K More This Year
By Bill Visnic August 24, 2010Vice President Joe Biden this week visited the Chrysler Group LLC assembly plant in Toledo, OH, that builds Jeeps.
While at Toledo North, Biden unsurprisingly touted the impact of government bailouts in saving jobs in America and stated one impressive figure, even if it almost certainly comes with caveats: Biden said the domestic content of vehicles sold in the U.S. is up from 60 percent in 2009 to 78 percent so far this year.
In a dual-pronged initiative, the Vice President's chief economic advisor, Jared Bernstein, took to the Huffington Post to lay out some numbers about the impact of the recession - and the still-emerging recovery - on the auto industry.
Bernstein wrote that in the year before President Barack Obama and Vice President Biden took office, the U.S. auto industry lost 431,300 jobs. He added that in the 13 months since Chrysler and General Motors Co. emerged from bankruptcy, the industry has added about 76,300 jobs. And of that number, more than half, 40,000, he attributed to suppliers.
And perhaps unwittingly summarizing the long malaise of the auto industry, Bernstein says the 40,000 jobs added in the auto-supplier sector was the best year-over-year jobs increase suppliers have recorded in a decade.
Bill Visnic is senior editor for Edmunds.com's AutoObserver
Photo of Vice President Joe Biden at Middle Class Task Force meeting in Philadelphia courtesy of the White House.
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