Great news: We're gonna lose $14 billion on the GM bailout

Sweet!

The Obama administration said Wednesday that the government will lose about $14 billion in taxpayer funds from the bailout of the U.S. auto industry.

In a report from the president’s National Economic Council, officials said that figure is down from the 60 percent the Treasury Department originally estimated the government would lose following its $80 billion bailout of Chrysler and General Motors in 2009.

The report’s release coincides with the administration’s efforts to tout the bailout’s role in the revitalization of the U.S. auto industry after last week’s announcement that Chrysler is repaying $5.9 billion in U.S. loans and a $1.7 billion loan from the Canadian government. Those payments cover most of the federal bailout money that saved the company after it nearly ran out of cash in and went through a government-led bankruptcy.

GM previously announced that it had repaid a little more than half of the $50 billion it received in federal aid.

And those paybacks are really shell games.

Weren’t we told that the bailouts would end up making money for the taxpayers? If you believe one Barack Obama, then yes, we were promised that we’d make some money off this deal.

With GM once again becoming a public company, Obama said, the government’s 61% stake in the carmaker was cut nearly in half. “What’s more,” he said, “American taxpayers are now positioned to recover more than my administration invested in GM.”

I don’t know what’s more tragic — that this oaf keeps getting away with massive failures like this, or that in the wake of his epic spending spree, $14 billion doesn’t even seem like it’s all that much money.