Treasury to lose $9.7B on bailout of GM

Reproduced here for fair use and discussion purposes. My comments in bold.

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This is what happens when government violates the Constitution. This is what happens when the oh-so-wise elected representatives with nearly unlimited access to astronomically large sums of money and egos to match essentially say, "How hard can it be?" This is what happens when unevolved pond scum, entirely convinced of their own superiority, are given unaccountable power.

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A watchdog says U.S. government expects to lose $9.7 billion on its bailout of General Motors. The government spent $49.5 billion to save GM five years ago. The Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program says the government has recovered $34.5 billion. That leaves $15 billion. (No it doesn't. The government also loses the time value of money, that is, what that money could have earned if invested. In addition, that $49.5 billion was borrowed money, so we had to pay interest on it. Finally, the economic ripple effects of redistributing this kind of money is felt throughout the economy as some people get money that was taken from the pockets of others and as people might have purchased cars from other manufacturers if GM and Chrysler had been allowed to fail.)  The government got 61 percent of GM’s stock in the bailout. It has sold all but 7 percent, or 101 million shares. Those would have to sell for $148 each to break even. GM stock was trading at $35.72 Tuesday. The inspector general says in a report to Congress that the government is showing a $9.7 billion loss on its books. (To be borne by the American taxpayer, thank you very much.) The government says it bailed out GM and Chrysler to save 1 million jobs and prevent a deeper recession. (That's $49,500 per job saved, not including the funds spent on Chrysler's bailout. And it's not even possible to know how many jobs were saved, because had GM and Chrysler been allowed to fail, many of those people would have gotten jobs elsewhere. It is also impossible to demonstrate that the bailouts prevented a deeper recession. We have no possibility of a doubleblind study. Such assertions are based on wishful thinking.

But even so, this economic downturn continues to this day. Tens of millions of unemployed, banks failing, companies failing, peoples' savings wiped out, home equity gone [if they've been lucky enough to keep their home], welfare rolls bursting, SNAP payouts quadrupled, $17 trillion in debt, plus a hundred trillion dollars of unfunded liabilities... It's nonsense to think that by any standard the economic downturn is ameliorated by government spending, or that we are coming out of it, or that any of the touted numbers are accurate. We are being lied to.)