The Rotten Truth About GM

The narrative that President Barack Obama offers up about his “rescue” of the U.S. automobile industry is tidy, upbeat and built on an utter lie.

His campaign has repeatedly claimed that the odd, modified bankruptcy that his administration arranged with General Motors and Chrysler saved 1.5 million jobs. This is based on the bizarre argument that without it all automobile manufacturing in the U.S. would have gone away. How and why exactly would Ford’s, Toyota’s and Honda’s U.S. plants have disappeared if GM and Chrysler had undergone a regular bankruptcy?

Democrats have also repeatedly claimed GM will end up repaying the federal government for all the help it got in recent years. Really? The taxpayers who provided $26.4 billion in direct, as-yet-unrepaid funds to GM have as collateral 500 million shares of GM stock. To break even, GM’s stock price needs to be about $53. At Thursday’s close of trading, it was $23.53, meaning the value of taxpayers’ GM stock is $11.8 billion, $14.6 billion short of what taxpayers are owed. Over the past two years, the Dow Jones is up 20 percent and GM is down 31 percent. Be scared, taxpayers. Very scared.

If such wildly deceptive claims were made in the private sector, regulators would launch a fraud investigation. But in politics, anything goes – and the president knows he can’t tell the truth about GM.