Indiana Senator Evan Bayh stopped in Fort Wayne Wednesday and promoted his call to make Indiana a leader in the development of new automobile components.

“My top priority is jobs,” he said. “I want to preserve the jobs we have, grow the economy and preserve the middle class.

“There are a lot of bright people in Washington, but there’s more common sense in the Midwest.    What do we need to do to stabilize the financial industry and get the economy moving in a better direction? What can we do to create the industry of tomorrow?”

Bayh met with business leaders and members of the media at Casa Ristorante on the west side of Fort Wayne for more than two hours Wednesday and answered questions and listened to concerns.

“There’s a lot of justification for pessimism,” he said. “This is a trying time, but if we step back and take a look we can build a better tomorrow.”

Bayh pointed out that 100 years ago 50 percent of the American public was involved in agriculture. Today it’s 3 percent. Now the United States is moving away from manufacturing jobs. Ten percent of the workforce in the country is in manufacturing. In Indiana, the figure is 18 percent. In Whitley County, the top 10 employers employ 1,737 people, including two auto-related companies, Autoliv and a second business that are closing.

“We can do this,” he asserted. “We have to put aside our partisan differences and come up with the right ideas.”

Bayh, a Democrat who has been in the Senate for 10 years and was governor of Indiana for two terms, said that northeast Indiana has a big stake in the survival of the auto industry. Indiana has the third-largest number of jobs associated with the industry in the country.

If the Big Three went under, the United States would lose about 145,000 jobs, he said. That’s manufacturing, suppliers and retailers, as well as the ripple effect that would affect restaurants, big chains and others.

“There are two things we need to do,” Bayh said. “One, how do we stabilize the situation. Two, how do we develop a sustainable business model. This requires all of those who have a stake in the game — management, labor, shareholders — to come to the table.”

He noted that in 1979, when the government bailed out Chrysler, not only were jobs saved but the taxpayers were paid back with interest.

“We want to save jobs and protect the industry,” Bayh said, adding that “green” cars are the future. “We can create a lot of good middle-class jobs for a tiny fraction of what we devoted to AIG and others. We can lay the foundation for the next generation of jobs.”

Bayh had three points he hammered home. “This is about jobs,” he said. “Two, we’re interested in common-sense solutions. Three, we all need to work together across party lines, management-labor, the private and public sector.”

Bayh answered a question about the cost of health insurance from the audience from a businesswoman who worked for a company that employed about 100 people.

“Small companies face problems with the cost of health care,” he acknowledged. “The government can match part of that. Also, for smaller companies we can eliminate the capital gains taxes so people would invest in smaller companies.

“Over the last 25 years, the Fortune 500 companies have created zero net new jobs at a time when the country has created 25 million,” Bayh said. “I think we can expect some tax reduction in health care costs.”

Access to credit also is a problem many Americans are facing. Bayh said the president of Rose-Hulman in Terre Haute, his hometown, said that if nothing is done to unfreeze student loans, his school would lost 25 percent of the student body.

"This whole financial thing has in impact across the economy,” Bayh said. “There will not be a tax increase next year. It would be folly with the economy we face now. And, we need a short-term and long-term answer to interest rates and inflation.”

He also was concerned that the country is facing deflation, meaning people are delaying making purchases in the hopes that prices will continue to fall.

“Capital investment by business is way off,” Bayh said. “Consumption is falling off, business and investment is falling off, expansion is falling off.  That’s the third engine for growth. We need to pump up demand and get credit out there to encourage people to buy. Then, when the economy starts to grow, we need to pull back to prevent inflation.”

He concluded the meeting by noting ironically that he couldn’t promise solutions. “When I was governor, I made decisions. As a legislator, I express my opinion.”

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