Foreign auto makers won billions in government subsidies.

And from the same states and lawmakers that voted against the U.S. automakers bailout.

Southern States Gave Auto Companies Tax-breaks and Cash for Training

By Mike Lillis / Washington Independent

To hear Southern Republicans tell the story, the financial burdens facing Detroit’s automakers are self-made troubles to be settled by the laws of Adam-Smith capitalism.

“We don’t think it is the role of government to intervene,” Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) told the Fox Business Network last week. “We need to let the market and the laws work the way they are already in place.”

Yet this argument — that the government has no business interfering in free markets — ignores an increasingly frequent tradition among Southern states, which have fronted billions in local taxpayer dollars in the past two decades to attract foreign auto plants. Those incentives, arriving in the form of tax breaks, training for new employees and even land, have enticed BMW to South Carolina, Mercedes to Alabama and Nissan to Tennessee. The result of the government subsidies has been the steady emergence of the South as an auto-manufacturing powerhouse. Some are dubbing it the “New Detroit” – a region where real estate is cheap and the labor’s not unionized.

Not coincidentally, these Southern states are represented by the same coalition of GOP senators who led the fight against the recent Detroit bailout proposal. That legislation would have provided $14 billion in emergency bridge loans to General Motors and Chrysler, both of which say they lack the finances to survive the month. Rallying behind the animated opposition of GOP Sens. Bob Corker (Tenn.), Richard Shelby (Ala.), Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and South Carolina’s DeMint, Senate Republicans killed the legislation.