Obama: We Didn't Create The Program That Gave Money To Solyndra

Looks like the only heat Solyndra is now producing is on our feckless President.

We are doing the all of the above strategy right. Obviously, we wish Solyndra hadn’t gone bankrupt. Part of the reason they did was because the Chinese were subsidizing their solar industry and flooding the market in ways that Solyndra couldn’t compete. But understand, this was not our program per se.

Congress–Democrats and Republicans–put together a loan guarantee program because they understood historically that when you get new industries–it’s easy to raise money for start-ups, but if you want to take them to scale sometimes there’s a lot of risk involved, and what the loan guarantee program was designed to do was to help start-up companies get to scale. And the understanding is that some companies are not going to succeed, some companies are going to do very well, but the portfolio as a whole ends up supporting the kind of innovation that helps make America successful in this innovative 21st century economy. Do I wish that Solyndra had gone bankrupt? Absolutely not. And obviously it’s heartbreaking it happened for the workers who were there.

There was an earlier loan program but as you might recall, the Bush administration refused to give Solyndra a loan under that. They only got the money after a new program was created under the so-called "stimulus" bill.

That Obama feels the need to lie about this shows they know the issue is cutting against them. Time to double down on it GOP.

posted by DrewM. at 11:31 AM

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