8 bailout questions answered

You can't. There is no way to make absolutely certain that a crisis like this will never happen again. But what can be done is to help the industry change so that it can better compete against foreign automakers who have lower costs.

That will likely mean painful sacrifices for industry stakeholders like auto workers, retirees and auto dealers, not to mention those at the auto executives themselves. But an industry failure would be far worse.

Still, there is a chance we will face this decision - whether to bail out the auto industry - again. But some economists argue that even the cost of repeatedly bailing out the industry will be less than the overall cost of allowing it to collapse.

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