The Inherently Ideological Evaluation of the GM Bailout

Megan McArdle has done consistently excellent reported pieces on the GM bailout, and her recent evaluation of its net effect on the U.S. Treasury is no exception. Her bottom line is that the deal caused U.S. taxpayers to:

burn $10-20 billion in order to give the company another shot at life. To put that in perspective, GM had about 75,000 hourly workers before the bankruptcy. We could have given each of them a cool $250,000 and still come out well ahead compared to the ultimate cost of the bailout including the tax breaks

This is in line with the Obama administration’s $14 billion estimate of the net cost to the Treasury, as reported in the Wall Street Journal. If anything, I think this understates the case on the direct costs, because it does not consider other direct transfers of economic value like the government support for Delphi that inflated the value of the asset that GM sold to create a big chunk of their headline profits this past quarter, green car development subsidies, and uncompensated interest costs on the government investment.

But no matter what realistic direct bailout costs you estimate, the objection of bailout defenders is that it is dwarfed by the other receipts or avoided expenditures created by the bailout. According to the Wall Street Journal, this is exactly the defense offered by the Obama administration:


There is a lot to this point, but it’s not really so simple. You can’t compare all of these net tax receipts (or more broadly, economic activity) to what would happen in “the world as it is today, minus GM.”



Anybody who tells you they can answer these question reliably is full of it.



The GM bailout is not an isolated case of this problem. And as I’ve argued many times, impressive-sounding empirical analysis is typically insufficient to measure the effect of important economic interventions like the stimulus program. If you can’t even measure what effect already-executed programs have had, how likely is it that you can predict the effects of future programs?


(Cross-posted to The Corner)