The Auto Bail Out

It’s official, the taxpayers took a $17B bath on it:

It did not have to be this way. Obama violated numerous bankruptcy laws when he strong-armed GM and Chrysler through bankruptcy, all to the benefit of United Auto Workers members. Non-union employees of the firms got screwed. And so did taxpayers.

That “every penny was paid back” was just another lie from the guy who said you can keep your doctor and your plan.

41 thoughts on “The Auto Bail Out”

  1. Gee Rand, next thing they are going to tell us is that Mr. Bin Laden is alive and living somewhere in Venezuala?

        1. Leland said;
          “He said dollar, not penny!!!”

          You’re right… he did! But in the bit Rand quotes, he said every dime. Hrmmm, well, this means Obama is telling the truth, so long as ten cents is more than 17 billion dollars.

          🙂

        2. Ahhh, you guys were so close but you got the wrong weasel words.

          From Rand’s quote, “We’ve now repaid taxpayers every dime and more of what my administration committed”

          He just wrote off the money given to GM under Bush. Sort of like he claimed that Bush didn’t do anything and that GM never went bankrupt.

      1. GM has now repaid every taxpayer dollar my Administration committed to its rescue, plus billions invested by the previous Administration

        Is anyone claiming that isn’t a true statement?

        1. It depends on the meaning of what “is” is.

          Or “jobs created or saved.”

          The intent of the statement is to imply that all of the money borrowed in the bail out was paid back, when that’s a lie. How does Obama know that the money paid back was the money he loaned, and not the money that Bush loaned? Both you and the administration are nauseating in your demagogic word games.

        2. This is a great example of how Obama loves to gruber his useful idiot followers. Dishonesty is the defining hallmark of the Obama administration.

        3. Is anyone claiming that isn’t a true statement?

          Are you asking everyone else prove a negative, while you have failed to provide any proof of the positive?

        4. Jim, yes, I’m claiming that “GM has now repaid every taxpayer dollar my Administration committed to its rescue, plus billions invested by the previous Administration” is not a true statement. Further, I’m saying that it’s a deliberate untruth – a lie.

          “Every taxpayer dollar my Administration committed to its rescue, plus billions invested by the previous administration” states as well as implies that he’s referring to the sum total cost to the federal government of the bailouts committed to by BOTH administrations. He states that the money has been repaid, when, in fact, it has not, and will not be. And that makes it a lie, just like his “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. Period!”.

          Obama made the damage even worse than it otherwise would have been via violating bankruptcy laws so that creditors (Including taxpayers via those “loans”) had their equity wiped out.

          Oh, and to make this a bipartisan rant; I said the same thing in late 2008 when Bush announced the start of the bailout “loans”; the claim that it would be paid back was a lie. (by Bush, in that case, and Obama now).

        5. Since no one has answered the specific moral question that you have asked, and since you seem to have difficulty processing moral dilemmas that involve liberals, here goes:

          If Chase bank loans the best friend of Chase’s CEO $10B, and then the next president loans the best friend another $20B, and then the friend pays back $21B the later president does not get to say “all the money I loaned was payed back”. First, legally, the money is first applied to the older debt. But ignoring that, from an accounting perspective only 2/3rds of the total loan has been paid back – the loan is not really separable.

    1. Do you have reading comprehension problems? It was within the last two months:

      Our investments in American manufacturing have helped fuel its best stretch of job growth also since the 1990s. America is now the number-one producer of oil, the number-one producer of natural gas. We’re saving drivers about 70 cents a gallon at the pump over last Christmas. And effectively today, our rescue of the auto industry is officially over. We’ve now repaid taxpayers every dime and more of what my administration committed, and the American auto industry is on track for its strongest year since 2005.

      I understand why you defend this BS, I just don’t understand why you think we’re as stupid as you seem to think we are.

      1. The comprehension problem is reading Obama’s statement as stating that every penny that the automakers ever received from the government has been paid back. That isn’t his claim.

          1. (makes hand gesture)

            . . . these are not the dollars paid back for the GM bailout you are looking for . . .

    2. “When did Obama claim that every penny spent by the taxpayers was paid back?”

      Couldn’t even be bothered to read the FIRST frigging paragraph of the article.

      Actually educating himself on the issue is far too much for Lord Jim. All Lord Jim needs is a few talking points from his Mastes and he’s off like a rocket.

  2. Unions give more to Democrats than Republicans and more to Democrats than Wall Street gives to anyone.

  3. screwed. And so did taxpayers. so just how screwed would the taxpayers have been if a couple million of them had been suddenly thrown out of work due to the complete collapse of the auto industry?

    1. Like most ignorant liberals you haven’t the faintest idea how economies really work. Especially how they work over time.

      Remember – almost all of the buggy whip workers were thrown out of work with the advent of the car. In general, employment rose.

      Think hard on that Gerrib.

      Wha tyou are trying to do is keep poorly run businesses afloat to avoid short term job dislocation.

      Besides, don’t you want to free the auto worker form job lock?

      1. You mean that just because one company goes bankrupt from mismanagement, it doesn’t mean the entire market just disappears?

        So, like when Enron collapsed, the energy industry didn’t just disappear?

    2. You mean the overpaid United Auto Workers would have been thrown out of work and a corporation dependent upon lobbying Congress for subsidies would go away.

      Sounds like a win for the consumer.

    3. If President Obama campaigned on “Yes, it cost the taxpayer 19 billion, but it was a great value because it protected 2 million jobs” would be one thing.

      But that is . . . not . . . what . . . was . . . said . . .

    4. GM went bankrupt with the bailouts. No reason that process couldn’t have happened $40b or $60b earlier.

    5. Why didn’t the government bail out Radio Shack? This signals the complete collapse of the radio industry. Think of the enormous impact on the economy from all those people who no longer have a job selling 1/4 stereo to mini headphone jacks!

      1. Why didn’t the government bail out Radio Shack? This signals the complete collapse of the radio industry. Think of the enormous impact on the economy from all those people who no longer have a job selling 1/4 stereo to mini headphone jacks!

        I’m more concerned about the impending complete destruction of the shack industry. Where are you going to put your stuff now? Lean-tos?

  4. how screwed would the taxpayers have been if a couple million of them had been suddenly thrown out of work due to the complete collapse of the auto industry?

    Liberal irrational thought in a nutshell, Chris. The industry can not collapse as long as people continue to buy cars. You are referring to a segment of the industry that was failing to compete. What should happen to those that fail to compete? Think hard Chris (it might hurt, but with practice it gets easier.)

    Answer: Their assets go to those that can compete.

    What taxpayers matter? All of them, right? So if some of them worked for a company that could not compete, shouldn’t they get the chance to work for another company or industry that could better use their skills? Isn’t this better for the overall economy?

    Do you know what happens to an economy that protects jobs of those that can’t compete? The entire thing fails which is bad for those taxpayers. Being rational, business people will only hire as few protected jobs as they can, assuming they are spending their own money and not taxpayer money. Not hiring is bad for an economy.

    Bailout money has other, more productive, uses. What happens to the overall economy when you take productive money and give it to the less productive? This isn’t a trick question, Chris. You know the answer. It hurts the economy. The more you do it the more it hurts. There is no point where it changes from hurting to helping.

    1. Chris’ logic can be applied to the bailout of the banks, too. While I was against the bailout (as Amazon, Microsoft, Walmart et. al.) would have immediately stepped in and bought the banks for pennies on the dollar, I could argue a la Chris that Millions Would Have Lost Their Jobs.

      Chris, were you for the bailout of the banks?

      1. Of course he was, Gerrib works at a bank. I think he even was a loan officer at the time. He may give the pretense that he’s against Wall Street, but so does Obama. But Gerrib will argue that the money went to help people stay in their homes, and not to bonuses for Goldman Sachs.

        Again, no secret that Goldman Sachs has given more to Democrats than Republicans.

        1. It’s funny how dems are in total denial of their Wall Street funding. I’ve shown Jim a couple of times how this is true and he holds up his hands to his ears and screams “la la la”.

  5. The bailing out of Detroit started when W was President. I still think it was a good idea because the automotive sector is important in strategic terms. Would you rather have done like the British which sold Rolls Royce to BMW, and Land Rover to Tata?

    Perhaps the Chinese would have bought pieces of GM together with the Indians. I know the Chinese were interested in the Hummer division at least.

    Is there any new car company in the US that has promise besides Tesla? Also if union labor is the only problem how come more companies have not started in other regions of the US which don’t have union labor to compete with Detroit? Other countries like Germany and Japan have unions and they seem to manufacture cars just fine.

    1. The computer industry is important so we should have subsidized Control Data to continue making computers in the 80s.

      Seriously, it isn’t that the auto industry would go away. Those assets don’t vaporize, they change hands and move (usually) into a more efficient operation.

      1. Totally different. In that case IBM was still around for the mainframe market at the same time the personal computer market was gaining in importance. There is nothing like that in the auto industry.

        Assets can be bought, workers laid off or relocated, equipment dismantled and moved to somewhere else even if that place is China. There are plenty of historical examples of whole industries relocating workers and tooling in the space of months. The Soviet Union did it twice. First by moving their own industry across the Urals to escape from the Nazis. The second time they dismantled German industry in the occupied areas and moved it to the Soviet Union.

        Not that anyone would want most of the equipment Detroit has I think.

        The main concern is that as a country loses its manufacturing capabilities, its research and military production potential capabilities are also lost.

        1. The main concern is that as a country loses its manufacturing capabilities, its research and military production potential capabilities are also lost.

          How is it any better to subsidies terrible competitors who continuously lose market share and get further and further behind for many decades? What happens is that your manufacturing capabilities go away anyway and in the meantime you greatly harm your economy through a vast misdirection of resources.

          There isn’t a law of physics that makes China the only place that can manufacture goods. If you’re losing manufacturing to China, then maybe you ought to look at why that happens.

        2. Not different at all. You are under the assumption that you know the complexity of an entire market. You don’t. There is a lot of hubris in your writing.

          You really should read Milton Friedman.

  6. GM went bust because people stopped buying fuel-inefficient, unreliable heaps of ironmongery that were designed to fall apart just as the warranty ran out – even if they were built according to already low standards in the first place.

    A similar situation occurred in Britain rather earlier. British Leyland, a behemoth that had grown by acquisition of many respected marques (Austin, Morris, Jaguar, Rover, Triumph…) was making junk. Badly designed rubbish that invariably fell apart with rust in short order, even if built to spec which it often wasn’t. And where is BL now?

    Their dealer network wasn’t much better either. I have a little story about that. I was in a dealer garage, having my car expensively serviced plus attending (supposedly) to a known problem when I overheard a conversation between two other customers. One had brought his car in to have replaced the little plastic widget which switches off the indicators when the manoeuvre is completed. A tiny piece of plastic weighing a few grams and costing 50p or so. It was going to take three days to have this item (for a car only 18 months old) delivered on the regular run from the BL depot, all of 20 miles away.

    Meanwhile, the other customer had a problem with his Toyota – a basically DOA problem with the engine, in which something important had snapped after 6 months of use. This sort of thing occasionally happens, but what happened next was instructive.

    Toyota had shipped a new engine from Japan in 48 hours. Not only that, but supplied a courtesy car in the meantime. Quite a difference, eh?

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