The GM payback spin

There was much fuss made recently by General Motors and the administration when GM "paid back" the $6.7 billion loan made to the company by the government during it's financial melt-down. This was touted by administration spokesmen as showing that the taxpayers would be getting their money back after all, and the TARP wasn't going to cost us all as much as originally estimated.

Unfortunately, there was a bit more to the story that wasn't widely reported, as you can read in the article Repaying Taxpayers With Their Own Cash in the New York Times on April 30.

In essence, the treasury allowed GM to "repay" it's TARP loan from another taxpayer-funded account held by the Treasury. So in fact GM didn't repay anything to the taxpayers; it just shifted it's loan from one Treasury account to another. There may have been good technical reasons for doing that, but for General Motors and the administration to portray that as "repaying" the taxpayers is, frankly, deceit. No wonder the public trust in the Federal government is at an all-time low.