The $23.6 billion represents a 25 percent loss on the feds $60 billion direct “investment” in GM. But that’s not all that taxpayers are on the hook for. As I explained previously, Uncle Sam’s special GM bankruptcy package allowed the company to write off $45 billion in previous losses going forward. This could work out to as much as $15 billion in tax savings that GM wouldn’t have had had it gone through a normal bankruptcy. Why? Because after bankruptcy, the tax liabilities of companies increase since they have no more losses to write off.
This means that the total hit to taxpayers, who still own about a quarter of the company, could add up to $38.6 billion. That’s even more that the $34 billion on the outside I had predicted in May.
But it’s OK, ‘cuz the president’s campaign supporters got paid off.
We know how Kagan’s going to vote, because she essentially told us in her confirmation hearings, when she said the federal government could force us to buy brocolli. She’s a totalitarian.
Really, Wickard was one of the worst decisions in court history, not just in how awful the reasoning was, but in what a devastating effect it had on the nation. This upcoming decision is an opportunity to finally try to reverse some of the damage.
NASA officials say the reduced funding for the commercial partnership to replace the space shuttle will delay the program two years and maybe longer.
So, at $450M per year to the Russians, the geniuses on the Hill have just increased out-year expenditures by almost a billion dollars to save half a billion next year. This is why the budget is a mess.
Thoughts on their intellectual exhaustion and maleducation:
To our mind, that sentence more than anything we’ve read encapsulates the spirit of Obamaville. It originally appeared in a San Francisco Chronicle story about an incident in which “dozens of college students” invaded a Bank of America Branch, “pitching a tent and chanting ‘shame, shame’ until they were arrested.”
On the way to B of A, they paused at Citi to scream at the walls. These are college students, acting like 2-year-olds throwing a tantrum. What does that tell you about their critical thinking skills–and about the standards of American higher education? The likes of the New York Times expect us to take such incoherent spasms of rage seriously as a political “movement.” What does that tell us about the standards of the liberal media?