You can call me Bobby, I run a little site called Thinksquad. I have an associates degree in industrial design from the Art Institute of Seattle. A bachelors of arts from the University of Washington, and graduated with a double major in philosophy and political science from Rutgers University. I also spent 10 years in the Air Force from 1994-2004, having spent five tours in Iraq and two tours in Afghanistan. I am now a strong advocate of the non-aggression principles, voluntaryism and peaceful parenting.
I believe in anarchism without adjectives, because no one really knows what will work best until we have the chance to try. Local communities should be free to try any non-coercive system, and residents should be able to move somewhere else if they don’t like the way things are going. Through solidarity, competition, and sharing of information eventually a system of social organization would evolve that will be superior to anything that we could imagine today. And even if we were right, we’d only be guessing without going through that process.
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Government Motors: As GM shares near record low, taxpayer loss on bailout rises to $35 billion
To quote Lando Calrissian, this deal’s getting worse all the time.
General Motors (GM) shares fell to a fresh 2012 closing low of 19.57 on Monday. The stock hit 19 in mid-December, the lowest since the auto giant came public at $33 in November 2010 following its June 2009 bankruptcy.
Normally you might say, tough luck investors. But this is Government Motors. The Treasury still owns 26.5% of GM, or 500 million shares. Taxpayers are still out $26.4 billion in direct aid. Shares would have to hit $53 for the government to break even.
Those shares were worth about $9.8 billion as of Monday. That would leave taxpayers with a loss of $16.6 billion.
But that’s not the full tally. Obama let GM keep $45 billion in past losses to offset future profits. Those are usually wiped out or slashed, along with debts, in bankruptcy. But the administration essentially gifted $45 billion in write-offs (book value $18 billion) to GM. So when GM earned a $7.6 billion profit in 2011 (more on that below), it paid no taxes.
Include that $18 billion gift, and taxpayers’ true loss climbs to nearly $35 billion.
