It’s been nearly a year since the Obama administration took the reins of General Motors, and if today’s headlines are any indication, things aren’t looking good for the troubled Detroit auto maker. First off, GM just isn’t making money. It posted a $4.3 billion loss for the second half 2009 – far from profitability, far from a government-led turnaround. The company claims it has a chance of “achieving profitability” in 2010, but keep in mind that GM is $50 billion in the hole to the American taxpayers, who paid for …
As President Obama’s recently-released budget for 2011 reveals, with or without a health care reform bill, Medicaid stands to receive a big, taxpayer-funded bailout. Again. The 2011 Budget includes $25 billion in additional funding for state Medicaid programs as an extension of the bailout that was included in the 2009 economic stimulus bill. As Heritage analysts Dennis Smith and Nina Owcharenko argued then, depending on federal bailouts to carry Medicaid through economic hardships is bad policy. The stimulus bill provided increased federal matching rates for Medicaid programs in all fifty …
The President of the United States tomorrow will inform the Congress on the State of our Union, as he is constitutionally mandated to do. The past 12 months have seen our country head down a dangerous course, and The Heritage Foundation can only hope that the President will use this time of reflection, coming on the heels of a stunning electoral loss, to change direction. You must recognize, Mr. President, that the State of the Union is not good. You need a new approach and fresh domestic and foreign policies. …
Within a span of just a few hours this week, three seemingly unrelated events all, by happenstance, made headlines in America: the one-year anniversary of President Obama’s inauguration, a historically earthshaking election in Massachusetts, and the release of The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom. But perhaps there are no coincidences in life. What narrative arc ties these headlines together? Our Index revealed today that the United States is no longer as economically free as it once was (and, in fact, dropped out of the “free” category altogether); President Obama …
If President Barack Obama’s New Year’s resolution was for the federal government to stop taking majority ownership in private corporations, he’s off to a bad start (or he decided to get one more in before 2010). Yesterday, the government indicated it will provide $3.8 billion in additional aid to GMAC and increase its stake in the company from 35% to a whopping 56%. As The Washington Post reports, the federal government now has ownership stakes in GMAC, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Motors, and American International Group – and holds …
One year and a week after Congress enacted legislation creating the $700 billion “Troubled Asset Relief Program,” the Treasury Department next week is expected to launch its first initiative to buy, well, troubled assets. Odd as it may be, in the year since its creation TARP has been used for just about everything but the original purpose of buying troubled, or “toxic,” mortgages and other securities from financial institutions. Now comes word that a long-planned Treasury program to acquire assets will be ready to begin. That’s bad news. Not only …
Remember the auto bailout? It’s not in the front pages anymore, but last week the Congressional Oversight Panel — a body created by statute to oversee TARP spending — issued a comprehensive and critical report on Washington’s foray into Detroit. The headline news, reported in most major media: the money won’t be paid back, not in full anyway. Even if the firms return to viability, taxpayers — said the panel — will likely never be able to recoup anywhere near all of the $77 billion or so they have put …
The federal government’s bailout parade wasn’t enough to save California this week. In a move that drew praise from some conservative quarters, President Obama refused to send federal aid to the Golden State. California had asked the Treasury Department to help with its $24 billion deficit. But rather than open the U.S. treasury to ailing states, Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner decided California must first get its budget in order before relying on a federal bailout. Reacting to the news at this week’s Bloggers Briefing at The Heritage Foundation, …
Yesterday, the Treasury Department announced that 10 financial institutions had been cleared to return their TARP bailout money — totalling some $68 billion to the government. This is good news — taxpayers are finally getting some of their money back, and banks look to regain their independence, putting the threat of Detroit-like nationalization behind them. Still, not everyone is happy. There’s been quite a bit of hand-wringing over whether these institutions really are healthy enough to return their money. But — while no one is saying the financial system is …
Yesterday afternoon, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg issued an order delaying the sale of Chrysler’s assets to a new firm controlled by Fiat, in order to more fully consider claims by a group of Indiana pension funds that the process violated federal law. A key argument made by the Hoosier funds is that the federal government can’t use the Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP, to bail out Chrysler (or General Motors for that matter). As explained here last December, the question comes down to whether a car maker is …
