We Own 11.8% Of GM. I Forgot That! How About You?

The 'truthiness' of those GM ads

By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN, QMI Agency

Political pundits owe a huge debt of gratitude to comedian Stephen Colbert for coining the word “truthiness” on The Colbert Report in 2005.
Because “truthiness,” defined by the American Dialect Society as “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than the concepts or facts known to be true” describes so much of the blather fed to us these days by politicians, business leaders and the media.
Take those television commercials by General Motors Chairman and CEO Ed Whitacre boasting GM has “repaid our government loans, in full, with interest — five years ahead of the original schedule”.
Ditto his simultaneous April 21 op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal, headlined “The GM Bailout: Paid Back in Full — The investment of U.S. and Canadian tax dollars worked.”
That’s pure “truthiness,” as was the subsequent crowing by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty this vindicated their decision to give GM billions of our tax dollars to bail out the company in late 2008, at the height of the global recession.
To be fair, “truthiness” isn’t lying. Technically, what Whitacre said is true, combined with a huge dose of what he hopes will be true. It’s just not the whole truth, as explained by Forbes.com columnist Shikha Dalmia, a senior policy analyst with the Reason Foundation.
What GM has actually repaid is only a small portion of the taxpayer bailout Harper and McGuinty engineered, along with U.S. President Barack Obama — a $6.7 billion loan from American taxpayers and $1.4 billion from us. (This at low interest rates GM couldn’t have obtained anywhere else, as the company was virtually worthless at the time.)
But most of the taxpayer-funded aid the U.S., Canada and Ontario gave to GM wasn’t through loans, but by purchasing an equity stake in GM. American taxpayers bought 60.8% of the company for about $43 billion, while we bought 11.7% for $8.1 billion.
So, will we ever get that money back? Who knows? Some analysts say yes, some no. It depends on what we can get for our stake in GM when it goes public again and sells shares. Let’s hope it sells lots of cars and trucks.

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