The automobile industry has been a consistent bright spot in the American economy over the last several months, as automakers have added jobs to meet growing demand. And news from the industry is only getting better, as new estimates expect automakers to sell 14.3 million cars in the United States in 2012 — 1.5 million more than they sold last year.

Factories for both foreign and domestic automakers are now working “at maximum capacity” and the industry is adding shifts and jobs to keep up with that rising demand, the USA Today reports:

Some plants are adding third work shifts. Others are piling on worker overtime and six-day weeks. And Ford Motor and Chrysler Group are cutting out or reducing the annual two-week July shutdown at several plants this summer to add thousands of vehicles to their output.

“We have many plants working at maximum capacity now,” says Ford spokeswoman Marcey Evans. “We’re building as many (cars) as we can.”

Chrysler and General Motors, the major beneficiaries of the auto rescue, have both reported their best profits in more than a decade, and both were already planning to add jobs this year. With factories now struggling to meet demand, both foreign and domestic auto companies are planning to add even more jobs — and, as the Center for American Progress’ Adam Hersh and Jane Farrell noted in April, the industry has added more than 139,000 jobs in the last three years.

The strength of the auto industry is yet another sign that letting it fail would have been a major mistake. Not only would it have cost more than a million jobs at a time when the economy was struggling, it would have prevented the current growth that is helping both the industry and the American economy recover.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney today attempted to dismiss criticism of his complicated stance on the rescue of the American auto industry, telling a Colorado radio station that his position has been the same since he first authored a New York Times editorial titled, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”

Since writing the editorial in 2008, Romney has both attempted to claim credit for the bailout and re-iterated his position that the industry should have been allowed to fail, most recently saying he would “take a lot a credit” for the auto industry’s recent successes. Those positions don’t conflict, though, according to Romney, who said he still has “the same position on the auto bailout” he had in the beginning:

HOST: You’ve certainly been accused of not sticking with one message, the most recent, your comments about the auto bailout.

ROMNEY: Well, actually, I have the same position on the auto bailout I had from the very beginning. I actually wrote about it.

Romney’s attempts to claim credit for the rescue, however, directly conflict with his 2008 editorial, in which he advocated for letting Chrysler and General Motors enter a managed bankruptcy financed by the private sector. “Frankly, that’s finally what the president did,” he said yesterday.

In reality, the auto rescue didn’t follow the plan outlined by Romney. The government stepped in to finance GM and Chrysler’s entries into bankruptcy because the private sector — including Romney’s former private equity firm, Bain Capital — refused to do so. Without the federal government’s bridge loan, Chrysler and GM would have been forced into liquidating, jeopardizing a million jobs and the future of the entire American automotive industry, as auto insiders, experts, and even Romney’s own endorsers have noted.

Faced with that reality, Romney has put on an extraordinary display of contortion, attempting to convince voters that he both opposed the bailout and came up with it at the same time.

During an interview yesterday with WEWS-TV in Cleveland, Mitt Romney continued his contortionist’s act regarding the Obama administration’s rescue of the auto industry, saying that he deserves a lot of credit for the industry’s turnaround. “I’ll take a lot of credit for the fact that this industry’s come back,” he said:

My own view, by the way, was that the auto companies needed to go through bankruptcy before government help. And frankly, that’s finally what the president did. He finally took them through bankruptcy. That was the right course I argued for from the very beginning. It was the UAW and the president that delayed the idea of bankruptcy. I pushed the idea of a managed bankruptcy and finally when that was done, and help was given, the companies got back on their feet. So I’ll take a lot of credit for the fact that this industry’s come back.

Watch it:

Since penning a 2008 op-ed calling for letting Detroit go bankrupt, Romney has desperately tried to spin the eventual auto rescue as his idea, ignoring that he doubled down on his original op-ed by writing in February, “The president tells us that without his intervention things in Detroit would be worse. I believe that without his intervention things there would be better.”

Romney’s plan for a bankruptcy devoid of government financing has been blasted by auto industry insiders and reporters as “truly reckless, detached from reality, and dishonest.” “Romney’s take just doesn’t square with the facts as I lived them,” said Yahoo! Autos reporter Justin Hyde. The Economist wrote that Romney “conveniently ignores” history with his position on the rescue.

Even Republicans who have endorsed Romney disagree with his take on the auto rescue. “There was no one that could have picked up those pieces other than the federal government,” said Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI). But Romney keeps trying to spin the rescue as a success for himself, rather than a case in which he got the policy exactly wrong.

For months, Mitt Romney has been dogged by a 2008 New York Times op-ed he wrote entitled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” But now, the same adviser who claimed Romney’s extreme views wouldn’t matter in the general election because it will be “almost like an Etch a Sketch” is doing some serious Etch a Sketch-shaking of his own.

Romney strongly opposed the “bailout” of General Motors, writing: “If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.” He doubled down on that in February, saying that his “managed bankruptcy” proposals would have been vastly superior to the Obama administration’s “crony capitalism plan.” Now that the federal intervention by the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations has proven a huge success, the Romney campaign is trying desperately to change its tune.

On Saturday, Romney’s senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom said:

[Romney's] position on the bailout was exactly what President Obama followed. I know it infuriates them to hear that… The only economic success that President Obama has had is because he followed Mitt Romney’s advice. … The fact that the auto companies today are profitable is because they’ve shed costs. The reason they shed those costs and have got their employee labor contracts less expensive is because they went through that managed bankruptcy process. It is exactly what Mitt Romney told them to do.

Fehrnstrom has made the same claim before. “Mitt Romney had the idea first,” he said last May. “Mitt Romney argued that instead of a bailout, we should let the car companies go through a restructuring under the bankruptcy laws.” This, of course, flatly contradicts Romney’s February editorial, in which he wrote of Obama’s efforts: “I believe that without his intervention things there would be better.”

As industry experts have noted, however, exactly following Romney’s plan would have led to the collapse of the auto industry, since the private sector wasn’t willing to lend GM and Chrysler the money they needed to get to managed bankruptcy. “There was no one that was willing to come up not only with the cash to keep them afloat but also to serve the warranties of everyone, you and I that drive all these cars,” Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), a Romney endorser, said in February. “There was no one that could have picked up those pieces other than the federal government.”

The American economy grew more slowly than expected in the first quarter of 2012, expanding at a rate of 2.2 percent. While the numbers are another illustration that the economic recovery is still on the right track (particularly compared to European countries that have fallen back into recession), they fell short of estimates.

One bright spot of the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis report, however, is that the American auto industry is continuing its resurgence and adding to economic growth:

Motor vehicle output added 1.12 percentage points to the first-quarter change in real GDP after adding 0.47 percentage point to the fourth-quarter change.

That the auto industry helped boost economic growth is yet another sign that letting the industry fail — as many Republicans, including presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, wanted to do — would have had disastrous effects on the American economy.

The auto industry rescue, according to some estimates, saved more than one million jobs. Since it was saved, the industry is growing again — its biggest companies are adding jobs, boosting sales, and posting record profits. As today’s report shows, that’s having a sizable impact on America’s economic growth, and it’s translating into job growth as well: in March, nearly 10 percent of the 120,000 jobs added to the economy came from growth in the auto and parts manufacturing sector.

Our guest bloggers are Adam Hersh, an economist at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and Jane Farrell, Special Assistant for Economic Policy at CAPAF.

Today’s jobs report from the Department of Labor shows that the private sector has added jobs for the past 25 months consecutively. One particular bright spot: auto industry employment continued its winning streak.

Nearly ten percent of the 120,000 U.S. jobs added in March were a result of strong growth in the motor vehicles and parts manufacturing sector, serving as yet another wake-up call regarding whose ideas are working for the economy. Many Republicans — including the GOP’s presidential front-runner, Mitt Romney, said we should “let Detroit go bankrupt“.

Auto industry jobs suffered a steady decline in the 2000s even before the Great Recession hit. From March 2001 — the previous cycle peak — to December 2007, auto jobs fell from 1.24 million to 956,000. As the housing bubble economy deflated and the financial crisis on Wall Street threw us further into a tailspin, auto industry employment fell by another one-third.

Fortunately, the Obama administration had the vision and perseverance to come to the aid of the auto industry in early 2009. By organizing a restructuring of the industry instead of letting it go bankrupt, the Administration saved hundreds of thousands of American jobs and a vital sector of the U.S. economy.

The graph here shows the cumulative net change in motor vehicles and parts industries jobs since June 2009–the month that General Motors filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and the Obama administration’s strategy for restructuring the American auto industry really kicked into high gear.

From June 2009 to March 2012, the industry increased employment by more than 22 percent, or 139,000 new jobs created. And last week, U.S. automakers registered their strongest sales growth since early 2008, even stronger than during the successful “Cash for Clunkers” program in summer 2009.

Industry output growth recovered, too. After falling 60 percent in 2008 and 25 percent in 2009, U.S. motor vehicle output grew by 27 percent in 2010 and 12 percent in 2011, adjusting for inflation. Growth in 2011 was held back by the March 2011 Japanese earthquake, which disrupted global automotive supply chains.

Without the Obama administration’s bold efforts to restructure the American auto industry, not only would these auto industry jobs not exist, but hundreds of thousands of other jobs upstream and downstream from the auto industry would have disappeared as well.

Greg Smith’s New York Times op-ed yesterday — in which he announced his resignation from Goldman Sachs due to the firm’s “toxic and destructive” culture — has garnered lots of reactions. But one of the most curious came this morning from Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), who told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd that Smith’s op-ed highlights why the government should not have intervened to rescue the American auto industry:

TODD: When you read this op-ed were you getting angry?

AYOTTE: Well, I get angry when I think about bailouts. Bailouts not only for the private sector but also, obviously, for the car companies. I don’t think that’s the right direction for us. And that highlights it, I think that’s what part of the anger was from the Tea Party movement, but also just anger about what’s happening here in Washington with the fiscal state of this country.

Watch it:

For starters, does Ayotte think that the American auto companies were not part of the private sector when they received government aid? But more importantly, does she not recognize the difference between rescuing a vital American manufacturing industry and bailing out banks in order to save the financial system, only to see them go back to the same practices that caused the mess in the first place?

Ayotte’s bizarre connection aside, Smith’s op-ed actually makes the case for the Volcker rule, a restriction on risky trading that’s included in the Dodd-Frank law. The financial industry has been pounding away on the Volcker rule, in an attempt to render it meaningless, which would allow the banks to simply go right back to all the pernicious practices that helped bring the economy to the brink of collapse.