Hey New York Times, How About Before Government Motors ‘Pays Back’ Obama, They Pay Back the Taxpayers?

The New York Times today has a piece entitled:

Auto Bailout Done, Obama Looks for Payback 

Two problems - with just the headline.  Which the Times either ignorantly doesn’t know - or knows and willfully ignores. The auto bailout isn’t “done.”  

And We the People deserve “payback” a lot more than President Barack Obama does.

American taxpayers still own more than 500 million shares of General Motors (GM) stock.

For us to break even, those shares must be sold at $53 per.  They are right now trading at around $25.  

Were our shares to be sold today, we’d lose in the neighborhood of $15 billion.

(Hence our website www.BailoutCost.com - which tracks via a Jerry Lewis-esque tote board the amount we’ll lose on the Government Motors bailout.)

Government Motors owes We the People - huge. But the means do exist to make us whole.

GM is currently sitting on about $34 billion in cash.  Our total stake in GM is about $26.5 billion.  

Why doesn’t GM buy us out at the break even price?

GM will then be free to payback the President - or whatever it is the New York Times and Obama have in mind. 

President Obama is campaigning for reelection on the “success” of the GM bailout - as the poster child of his vision of government Crony Socialist interloping in the private sector. 

What he and his ilk are instead doing is building on failure - not picking winners and losers, but propping up losers at the expense of winners.

With the myriad of losers bailed out - to the tune of trillions of our coin lost and gone away - GM is an opportunity to just this once actually come out even.

There’s also a Pledge on www.BailoutCost.com:

I will not buy any Government Motors products until they've paid back American taxpayers.  

The New York Times knows (or should know) that GM owes us the coin - and has the means to make good on the Pledge.  

So do we.

Let’s work to ensure that they do.