Treasury now estimates the 2009 bailout will eventually cost the government $25.1 billion, according to a report sent to Congress on Friday.
That is up from the last quarterly estimate of $21.7 billion.
Since the $80 billion bailout of the auto industry, Detroit's big automakers have moved from crisis to profit. GM and Chrysler were put through government-funded bankruptcies that slashed costs and debt.
“Treasury now estimates the 2009 bailout will eventually cost the government $25.1 billion, according to a report sent to Congress on Friday.”
Excellent. Then the question is how many jobs were saved. Obama claims more than 1 million:
http://www.barackobama.com/auto-recovery/
If so, then each job was saved at a taxpayer cost of ~$25K. If true, that’s actually not such a bad deal, especially when you consider that unemployment and food stamps for laid-off workers likely would have totaled a similar amount. The stimulus, in contrast, cost in excess of $250K per “job saved” which is an absurd and unaffordable amount by which to try and keep an economy going. I’m not in a position to quarrel with the 1 million jobs saved figure, but will observe that the jobs outcome presumably would have been very similar under the bankruptcy terms proposed by Romney. I don’t know whether Romney’s plan would have required $25B in taxpayer funds. At minimum, it would NOT have channeled tens of billions to unions. Somewhere I saw that the unions essentially got 75 cents on the dollar vs. bondholders, who got only 10 cents on the dollar—something that never would have occurred in a standard bankruptcy (which has to follow rules/guidelines/precedents).