GM misleading with debt claim

While it's true that GM has repaid its bailout money, it has done so with funds from another taxpayer-funded account.

By The Denver Post
Posted: 04/26/2010

Exhibiting quite a lot of gall, General Motors is trying to spin the public with an ad campaign launched last week based on breathtakingly misleading information.

As partial owners of the company, the American taxpayers who saved it from economic ruin deserve better.

Shown strolling down an assembly line, GM's new chief executive brags that the company has repaid its government loans "in full, with interest, five years ahead of the original schedule."

The executive, Ed Whitacre, repeated the claim in an op-ed headlined "The GM Bailout: Paid Back In Full" in The Wall Street Journal.

The assertion is based on the fact that GM used funds from a line of credit offered to it under TARP to pay off a $5.8 billion loan from the U.S. and Canadian governments. In other words, GM paid off a fraction of the tens of billions of dollars taxpayers have invested in the company from another taxpayer-funded account.

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