A New Chapter

Are you sitting around, staring out the window at your mailbox, waiting for the delivery of your share of General Motors' payback to the American people. Your generous taxpayer donation of forty-nine and a half billion dollars helped keep GM from ending up on the side of the road, another rusted-out casualty of the Great Recession. That amounts to about one hundred and fifty million dollars per person.
I sense your skepticism. Why would some giant corporation suddenly turn benevolent and share their prosperity with the people who made it possible for them to come back from the dead? Maybe you didn't take advantage of the fact that we owned a car company for a while there. I didn't get a chance to head over to Detroit for lunch in the executive dining room. Nor did I manage to find the time to send all of my ideas for flying cars, deluxe paint jobs, and cup holders to the powers that be. That's okay, since I am sure they've been very busy trying to figure out how to pay back all that money.
The truth is, GM isn't going to pay back the fifty billion dollars, and I hope they forgive my rounding that figure up. Instead, they are working on the much more pedestrian amount of the pure loan: six point seven billion. Or seven billion, to be fair. How did they turn things around so fast? Back when this whole package was being put together, the President put thirteen and a half billion dollars in an escrow account for use as working capital while GM sorted out their bankruptcy. That's the cash that is finding its way back to the U.S. Treasury. And that initial public option? The world's biggest? The White House would like us to know that all of that money will be back in our metaphorical pockets by the middle of 2012. So, if you're camped out next to your mailbox, you might want to bring a good book. It could be a while before we get our piece of the pie.