Bailout Watch 573: GM Bailout Cost Taxpayers $12,200 Per Car

This according to the National Taxpayer’s Union report “ The Auto Bailout: A Taxpayer Quagmire,” authored by Rochester Institute of Technology Professor of Economics, Thomas D. Hopkins. That number includes the $52.9b taxpayer “investment” in General Motors, as well as GM’s portion of the GMAC bailout, which brings GM’s taxpayer tab to over $60b. Chrysler’s GMAC-inclusive bailout bill totals $17.4b, or $7,600 per vehicle, based on estimated 2009/2010 sales. Don’t believe that GM or Chrysler will match their projections over the next twelve months? The NTU estimates that total government support for the auto industry comes out to $800 per taxpaying American family. These numbers do not include the Cash for Clunkers program, likely future bailouts of GMAC (projected at a further $2b), or Department of Energy retooling loans (ATVML). These numbers also do not reflect the very real possibility that GM, Chrysler and GMAC could continue to drain taxpayer money post-2010. “For each year of survival beyond 2010,” the report warns, “the burden per vehicle would decline [Ed: but not disappear] – so long as no additional government funding is provided.”

The report concludes:

Viewed from today’s vantage point, the auto bailout is troublesome in a number of respects. As already noted, the bailout has become a taxpayer quagmire, escape from which will be a major public policy challenge. The recommendations offered by the GAO have much merit, especially those focused on developing an exit plan and on ensuring during the interim that management of the three firms is insulated from political pressures. Sound business practices, not special interest advocacy, should prevail. Both require that a qualified, objective and independent team be given full access to current information about the firms’ operating and financial conditions.

Greater transparency should be achieved so that taxpayers will be better able to understand both issues and outcomes. In particular, taxpayers as part-owners of each of the three firms should be given the same information, on the same timely basis, that public corporations routinely would be required to provide shareholders.

More generally, the bailout has been a sobering experience whose adverse consequences cannot be corrected easily. Auto producers whose products American consumers find most appealing have been notably missing from the roster of bailout recipients. Our subsidies instead have gone to the poor performers, firms whose past management decisions proved faulty. As a result the bailout has created moral hazard problems, inadvertently handicapping the progress of stronger, non-subsidized producers. The problems extend beyond just the auto industry, as favored status for one financial company and its bank necessarily complicates prospects for non-subsidized rivals. The time has come to stop such bailouts, and in an orderly way, to seek at least some recovery for taxpayers.