Now This Is A Plan?
by James Glaser
February 18, 2009

General Motors came back to Congress with a request for $12 billion more in bailout money, for a total of $30 billion. Yahoo Finance explains about the money GM has gotten and what more they want:

GM has been kept afloat since the start of the year with $13.4 billion in loans from the U.S. Treasury. Its expanded aid request for up to $30 billion includes a $7.5 billion credit line in the event that the autos market remains depressed.

On top of asking for more money, the company said it would get rid of 47,000 workers worldwide, and it would shut down another 5 plants here in the States. They also said they would cut another 20,000 jobs here in the United States.

Now all that sounds good, and you would think that with cuts like that, the company would be able to get back in the black. However, here is a monkey that GM has on its back that makes me wonder why Congress is even thinking about giving them more money. General Motors Corporation owes $47 billion dollars to the UAW Employee Retiree Health Care Fund and its bondholders.

Even if Washington gives GM everything it is asking for, it is still $47 billion dollars in debt, and that is the debt they admit to. Nobody in Washington or anywhere else knows what their total debt is. They don't need Washington's money to pay down debt, they need it to stay afloat. General motors admits that they will be out of cash by the end of March, and we gave them $13.4 billion in January.

So General Motor's plan to stay in business is to get billions of dollars from the American tax payer. When that money runs out, then they can always go back and ask for more. That shouldn't be that long from now, as they blew through that first bailout in a matter of weeks.

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