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this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
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Can you imagine the screams of, “COMMUNISM!!!!” If Obama or Biden had done this. It’s all we would hear about for an entire election cycle. Fox “News” would play it nonstop.
Didn't Obama do it for GM and a bunch of other companies as part of a bailout package for a period of time?
So did Bush. It's only bad when their enemies do it. It's righteous and just when they do it.
So if I'm reading that right they set for $700 billion worth of purchase during the Bush admin, it got reduced to 426.4 billion by 2014 and they claimed they made $15.3 billion. It sounds like they made a 3.5% gain on their investment total. A win! Yay... Only if you ignore the fact that if that money went in from 2009-2024, the money averages out on inflation to have been worth 481.29 billion. A loss of $12.15 billion dollars if they would have done anything else with it.
Overall I wouldn't be mad that they wasted that money if they had focused on structuring the company moving forward in a manner that wouldn't end up supporting a wealth divide moving forward. The CEO "only" had a salary of $2.1 million in 2024. Which actually sounds mildly alright. Yet her take home was $29.5 million when they got done throwing stocks and bonuses at her. That's after GM stock started 2024 at $55.50.... and ended the year at $35.64.
So the company lost ~36% of its "worth" and she got more than 13x her salary in stock and bonuses.
I was wondering recently if the idea of opportunity cost is the same for governments that can print their own money versus all other entities. I'm not entirely clear on how the that automaker bailouts were financed but would that money even have existed if they hadn't used it for the bailout? It's not like the government was going to create that amount of money and put it in a savings account.
A more appropriate way to look at it might be whether the money earned more than it cost the government to service the debt. IIRC servicing government debt is not inflation-adjusted, so it's probably more informative to compare it to the cost of the debt not inflation adjusted-growth.
But this gets pretty weird since it's not how finance works for entities that cannot print their own money.
Ah but a bailout package is different. That's a display of powerful capitalism. A private company so powerful it can't be allowed to fail and a government so strong it won't allow it to fail.
It was Bush just before he left office.