The good news: The federal government is no longer in the car business, at least not where General Motors is concerned. The bad news, it only cost taxpayers $10.5 billion. Tell me, why do some people think government is the answer to everything?
From USA Today:
U.S. taxpayers no longer own any of automaker General Motors. The Treasury sold the last of its remaining 31.1 million GM shares today. It started with 500 million shares in 2010.
The taxpayer loss on the GM bailout is $10.5 billion. The Treasury department said it recovered $39 billion from selling its GM stake, and had put $49.5 billion of taxpayer money directly into the GM bailout.
The total bailout rises to $51 billion, including another $1.5 billion that Treasury put into programs to keep GM suppliers afloat and to make sure owners’ warranties were honored, plus some into the old GMACfinance company that’s now known as Ally — separate from a muchlarger Ally bailout.
That $1.5 billion didn’t go directly to GM, but was spent largely on its behalf.
...The Obama administration emphasized today that the loss it took on GM shares was far less costly than allowing GM to fail.
This is maddening. The president is a liar, plain and simple. The federal government bails out and unconstitutionally takes over (like the United States is some sort of banana republic) a terribly run company whose unions were driving it to the ground, then sells it a couple of years later at a $10 billion loss to taxpayers and we’re suppose to be grateful that it wasn’t worse?
What, exactly, was “far less costly”, Mr. President? Detroit went bankrupt, the economy is awful, taxpayers lost billions, an unimaginably terrible precedent was set that seems like something right out of Atlas Shrugged and the Constitution was completely ignored. Yeah, I don’t expect to be thankful for this any time soon.
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