GM Used TARP to "Repay" Loan

You might recall that on October 3, 2008, Democrats in Congress passed a massive bailout of Wall Street investment firms called TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program), which the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) optimistically (or disingenuously) estimated would cost "only" $700 billion of your tax dollars. Although President Bush supported the massive TARP bailout of Big Business, not a single Republican in the House or Senate supported it.

Seeing big financial institutions get a government bailout, the Big Three American auto companies, GM, Ford and Chrysler, went begging to the federal government on November 19, 2008 to get their own multi-billion-dollar bailout. Congressional Democrats and President Bush agreed to an auto bailout bill that the CBO again optimistically estimated would cost "only" $15 billion. Conservative Republicans in the Senate, however, filibustered the auto bailout. Of 41 Republicans in the Senate, only 10 liberal or mushy moderates ones voted to kill the filibuster, along with 40 Democrats and the Senate's two liberal "independents" (who caucus with the Democrats). A supermajority of 31 Republicans (just more than three-fourths) joined 4 Democrats in supporting the filibuster. Without 60 votes to kill the filibuster, the Democrats failed to bring this second Big Business bailout to a vote, and it died.

Not to be deterred by Congress, President Bush unconstitutionally used an "executive order" to amend the first massive bailout law, TARP, to allow himself to give to the auto companies some of the money intended to bail out financial firms. GM and Chrysler eagerly took the TARP money, but Ford executives, wanting to keep their jobs, changed their minds. (Once Obama became president, he used the Bush-Democrat bailout of GM to force the old GM CEO to resign.)

On February 18, 2009, GM and Chrysler again approached the federal government, hats in hand, begging for another bailout. On February 24, Obama announced in an address before the joint session of Congress that he would give GM and Chrysler another $15 billion of your tax money. (It amazes me that liberal Democrats still run around claiming that it's Republicans and not liberal Democrats who support Big Business.)

You might have noticed recently that the new CEO of GM has been running TV ads where he crows about how GM has paid back the billions of dollars of your tax money that the federal government gave GM so that the United Auto Workers could continue to be the most overpaid union workers in the world. As Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) reports in the two stories below, however, Obama's GM CEO should be eating crow instead: TARP's own inspector general, Neil Barofsky, reports that GM merely used more TARP money to "pay back" the subsidies, which came largely from TARP money in the first place! So GM's much-vaunted repayment is half like using your VISA card to pay off your MasterCard--and half like using your VISA card to repay your VISA card! I must say that the Democrats' capacity for blatant deception never ceases to amaze me.

http://newsmax.com/InsideCover/charles-grassley-gm-bailout/2010/04/23/id/356756?s=al&promo_code=9CE6-1

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/04/22/grassley-slams-gm-administration-loans-repaid-bailout-money/