$14 billion is a small price to pay to dump a failing company with their chips all in on the hope that a $40,000 electric car is going to save them..

At this point maybe the $14 billion is a good deal..


WASHINGTON – The Obama administration said Wednesday that the government will lose about $14 billion in taxpayer funds from the bailout of the U.S. auto industry.

In a report from the president's National Economic Council, officials said that figure is down from the 60 percent the Treasury Department originally estimated the government would lose following its $80 billion bailout of Chrysler and General Motors in 2009.

The report's release coincides with the administration's efforts to tout the bailout's role in the revitalization of the U.S. auto industry after last week's announcement that Chrysler is repaying $5.9 billion in U.S. loans and a $1.7 billion loan from the Canadian government. Those payments cover most of the federal bailout money that saved the company after it nearly ran out of cash in and went through a government-led bankruptcy.

GM previously announced that it had repaid a little more than half of the $50 billion it received in federal aid.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said U.S. auto companies are now at the forefront of a comeback in American manufacturing.

"We cannot guarantee their success, and at some point they may stumble. But we've given them a better shot," Geithner wrote in an opinion piece in Wednesday's edition of The Washington Post.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110601/ap_on_re_us/us_obama_autos_2

I never understood this in the first place.

Why was GM considered too important to fail?

What about the mom and pop shops that were struggling? Why didn't the government bail them out?

In my opinion, GM is too big. If the government would have left them alone it would have been a natural selection that corrected the problem.

I don't think the government should have bailed out the banks either.

No one asked me as a tax payer whether or not I wanted to give money to banks to keep operating...

because they(or their unions) supported obama during his election... he has to make good on his returns...