Let’s call it what it is… Vote buying.

 Let’s call it what it is… Vote buying.

By : Michael Becker

Look, I’m no novice Washington watcher, I’ve been around the barn more than once. Every time I think I’ve seen everything I get surprised. I’ve seen politicians do favors for votes for decades. They do it in NH, in MA, in PA, in RI, in DE, in NM, in AZ and in CA. I know because I’ve lived in all of those places. And it’s an art in Washington, that’s what earmarks are all about and that’s why CongressCritters insist that the business of the nation can’t be done without them. Just ask Rick Santorum or Ron Paul. Or almost any one of ‘em.
And then there’s President Barack Obama. He’s raised a simple art to an art form that should be on display in the Guggenheim. Lord knows its cost us more than it cost to build the Guggenheim.
There’s the legion of “green” loan guarantees to companies like Solyndra that will end up costing us untold billions, and it seems, as the rocks are turned over, that the primary underwriting guideline was how much money the “green executives” had given/bundled for President Obama’s campaign. You’d think that “green” might rightly be redefined from “environmentally friendly” to “Obama campaign friendly”.
Let’s not forget Lightsquared who managed to get approval for spectrum so that remote areas could have high speed Internet and stuff. Of course the signal caused those GPS thingys in airplanes to not work, but the CEO was a major fund raiser for the President and they actually expected the FCC to slide one through for the home team. Then the pests in the Pentagon and the aviation industry went public about planes crashing into things and Lightsquared crashed instead. One for the good guys.
And, the poster vote purchase was, and is, Government Motors. We’ve written on this before, but it bears a rerun. A quick background: General Motors (and Chrysler) found themselves in a sort of “cash free” position. They’d managed to run their businesses off the proverbial cliff. Now if this had been Mike’s Bar and Grille, I’d have had to file for bankruptcy. If I had union contracts, the court would likely have voided them and imposed a new contract that gave me the ability to carry on the business in a profitable manner and pay off my creditors. But not companies whose union is the United Auto Workers who, incidentally tossed the President a hundred million or so to get him elected in 2008, managed to get their President to forge a special deal for THEM. They got to keep their contracts, they got to keep their benefits and they got to keep their company paid union organization within GM. And they got a huge chunk of GM stock to go with their seats on the board of directors. And we got the tab.
The initial bill for the “bailing out the auto industry” – that’s the President’s rhetoric and it’s a flat out lie – was $80 billion dollars. Kinda puts the $500 million for Solyndra in perspective, huh? But never fear we were told by the President at the time that we’d not only get the money back, we’d make a profit, and on February 28 he said, “Now, three years later . . . That bet is paying off, not just paying off for you, it’s paying off for America.” Sounds pretty good, right? This President’s speech writers and the President-O-Prompter have a way of making terminal cancer sound like a common cold. We shouldn’t worry.
And then there’s the facts. Pesky things. And hopefully the Republicans will get a nominee who will this administration with the facts on a daily – no hourly – basis. The President and his lackeys aren’t “spinning” the facts, they’re lying to the American people every time they move their lips.
From The American, the online magazine of the American Enterprise Institute…

The … chart [shown below], drawn from information released by the Treasury, shows the current status of the financial assistance that the automotive industry has received through TARP. Out of the total $80 billion that has been paid out, only $35 billion has been repaid, some $7 billion has been written off, and $37 billion is still outstanding. That is, 9 percent of the original amount has already been lost, and close to half is still in limbo.
The latest Congressional Budget Office report estimates that the total cost of the bailout will end up being $20 billion. The biggest culprit will be GM, since the Treasury has no remaining investment in Chrysler, having sold its shares in July 2011.

The President has already written off over seven billion of your dollars that he said weren’t at risk, and there’s another $37 billion that is still in the wind (another lousy green bet, and no pun was really intended) that it’s questionable whether we’ll ever see. That money is tied up in GM shares which are trading at around $25 and need to be at $55 before the taxpayers are made whole. The compounding problem with this picture is that if the government dumps their (your) GM shares on the market the price will drop like a rock. “Well OK,” they’ll say, “we’ve got a seat on the Board! We can influence the company and protect the taxpayers!” Pixie Dust. Do you think for one second that this administration will do anything but rubber stamp the UAW’s votes on the board? If you do, I can get you one heck of a deal on some nice swamp land in Southern Arizona.
So that $7.4 billion number isn’t even a low-ball estimate, it’s not even in the ballpark. Tack on that $37 billion no interest loan – which is effectively what it is – and you’ve got $44 billion. Of money that the Federal Reserve printed from whole cloth, expanding the money supply, and then was compounding that foolishness, was borrowed from the Chinese. Feel better yet?
Oh, don’t go away, I’ve got another bucket of cold water for you.
The US Treasury, thanks Tim & Barack, allowed GM to retain some $45 billion of loss carry forwards when the government restructured them. In any normal restructuring where the business effectively changes hands, loss carry forwards for tax purposes are disallowed, but Barack wanted to help out his friends at the UAW. That little maneuver will cost the government (you) another $15 billion or so in lost tax revenue. GM won’t be paying income tax for the next god-knows-how-many-years. Do keep a close eye on the UAW’s pay and benefits and the management bonuses paid out though.
So, with his magic wand, the President has given his supporters in the UAW not $7 billion, not even $44 billion, more like $59 billion of US taxpayers dollars. Heck of a job sparky.