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Obama’s fraudulent accounting on the GM bailout
Cooking the books. Stretching the Truth. Distorting the facts. Lying.
Whatever you call it, The Washington Post is shocked — shocked! — that Dear Leader is intentionally misleading the American public about his administration’s bailout of GM in order to make himself look better for the 2012 campaign.
“Chrysler has repaid every dime and more of what it owes American taxpayers for their support during my presidency.”
— President Obama, June 4, 2011
With some of the economic indicators looking a bit dicey, President Obama traveled to Ohio last week to tout what the administration considers a good-news story: the rescue of the domestic automobile industry.
…What we found is one of the most misleading collections of assertions we have seen in a short presidential speech. Virtually every claim by the president regarding the auto industry needs an asterisk, just like the fine print in that too-good-to-be-true car loan.
Let’s look at the claims in the order in which the president said them.
“Chrysler has repaid every dime and more of what it owes American taxpayers for their support during my presidency — and it repaid that money six years ahead of schedule. And this week, we reached a deal to sell our remaining stake. That means soon, Chrysler will be 100 percent in private hands.”
Wow, “every dime and more” sounds like such a bargain. Not only did Chrysler pay back the loan, with interest — but the company paid back even more than they owed. Isn’t America great or what?
Not so fast. The president snuck in the weasel words “during my presidency” in his statement. What does that mean?
According to the White House, Obama is counting only the $8.5 billion loan that he made to Chrysler, not the $4 billion that President George W. Bush extended in his last month in office. However, Obama was not a disinterested observer at the time. According to The Washington Post article on the Bush loan, the incoming president called Bush’s action a “necessary step . . . to help avoid a collapse of our auto industry that would have had devastating consequences for our economy and our workers.”
Under the administration’s math, the U.S. government will receive $11.2 billion back from Chrysler, far more than the $8.5 billion Obama extended.
Through this sleight-of-hand accounting, the White House can conveniently ignore Bush’s loan, but even the Treasury Department admits that U.S. taxpayers will not recoup about $1.3 billion of the entire $12.5 billion investment when all is said and done.
The White House justifies not counting the Bush money because, it says, that money was completely spent when Obama was making a tough political decision on whether to extend another loan. In other words, a decision to do nothing at the time would have resulted in the immediate loss of the $4 billion that Bush had extended.
This is chicanery. Under the president’s math, Chrysler paid back 100 percent of Obama’s loan and less than 70 percent of Bush’s loan. A more honest presentation would combine the two figures to say U.S. taxpayers got back 90 percent of what they invested. In fact, that is how the Treasury and other administration officials frequently portray it; it is just when Obama speaks that the numbers get so squishy. [emphasis added — FMP]
This is the same ploy the President used repeatedly while selling ObamaCare. Whenever one examines President Obama’s big-government talking points, there are many more lies to be uncovered. Be sure to read the entire article.
WaPo isn’t the only one covering this. There’s an excellent article at Examiner.com that details the fraudulent claims of GM’s repayment, and the Obama administration’s complicity with the smoke-and-mirrors.
The Treasury Department saw the misleading advertisements GM was planning to make in advance. GM’s deceptive marketing strategy was thoroughly laid out for Treasury Department officials, who had the opportunity to object, but they raised no objections to those misleading claims.
Indeed, Treasury Secretary Geithner issued a statement at the start of GM’s ad campaign, trumpeting its misleading claims, crowing that “GM had repaid in full the $4.7 billion balance it owed under the government’s Trouble Asset Relief Program.” But this so-called “repayment” was just a deceptive accounting trick. GM used government bailout money to make the “repayment.” As the Washington Examiner noted, Geithner was endorsing a “blatant misrepresentation.”
More importantly, this so-called “repayment” was just a drop in the bucket compared to what GM has received from taxpayers. The federal government had yet to recover the lion’s share of the more than $50 billion it loaned the company. Why? Because that $50 billion was mostly “converted into stock held by the Treasury Department” – stock worth far less than the billions the federal government injected into the company.
When Enron and Lehman Brothers were discovered to have done things like this, people went to jail. When Obama does it, he expects a return trip to the Oval Office.
Posted by FullMetalPatriot
12th gen. American, Constitutionalist, Harley-riding Texan, gun owner & NRA member, blogger, illustrator, Florida Gator alumnus. #TCOT
12th gen. American, Constitutionalist, Harley-riding Texan, gun owner & NRA member, blogger, illustrator, Florida Gator alumnus. #TCOT
