Your Tax Dollars At… Um, Well…

Yesterday I bent over backwards being as impassionate and even-handed as possible when discussing economic matters.

Today?  Not so inclined.

You’ll be happy to know that $7.2 billion — that’s billion with a B — dollars “loaned” by the government to Chrysler will not be repaid.  That’s $7.2 billion — that’s billion with a B — dollars of taxpayers money flushed down the drain.

Well, not entirely.  If you’re a member of the UAW you’re in clover.  Think every dime of that money handed over by Chrysler to the UAW so as to preserve their fatcat paychecks and even fatter benefits package is going to stay put?  Damn straight, Skippy.  The least the UAW can do is send us a thank you card with a note at the bottom reading “your tax dollars at… um, well, we call it work.”

As a professir of finance (translation: someone who knows what they’re talking about) opined last fall — and oh, how I wish we’d listened — American auto manufacturers have burned through hundreds of billions of dollars of investment capital in recent years.  That’s bad business.  Bad business deserves to fail.  Not have taxpayer money handed over without a prayer of getting it back.

The current administration has often compared itself to that of Abraham Lincoln.  The only genuine corollary is how Lincoln was determined to preserve the union at all costs.  So is Obama.  Unfortunately for us, the union Lincoln sought to keep alive was that between the states.  Obama?  Not so much.  Unless the UAW is now a state.  The unspoken yet so painfully obvious agenda item for this administration is making sure the UAW doesn’t see so much as a dime of the money it bled off from the saps that ran Chrysler, and GM and Ford as they ran their once proud companies into the ground, disappear in bankruptcy court.  Investors foolish enough to actually give these companies a dime now seeking to protect their own investors’ interests by no longer throwing good money after bad?  Screw ‘em.  Save the bloated pensions!

And these people genuinely wonder why everyone doesn’t love them.

(Hat tip to Dan Collins at Protein Wisdom)