Not All Jobs Are Created Equal
By Matt Patterson & Crissy Brown, American Thinker
Once upon a time, there was a company called General Motors. It made cars. But the company was poorly run, and the high cost of its unionized workforce drove it to insolvency. But before the doors were shuttered forever, a great and benevolent benefactor swooped in and bailed out the failing company.
That benefactor was you.
And by you, we of course mean Uncle Sam, who in 2008 stepped in to flood GM with billions from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), a desperate attempt to shore up a variety of decrepit institutions whose imminent collapse threatened the entire U.S. economy (or so we were told). The initial bailout was followed in summer 2009 with another round of auto stimulus; all told, the taxpayer tab for General Motors bailout was a cool $50.7 billion.
What did we get for that money? It’s true that some jobs were saved. But President Barack Obama loves to embellish what the bailout actually achieved. He claimed at an April campaign event, for example, that the bailout “saved probably a million jobs” and that “GM is now the number-one automaker again in the world.”