Government can do some things right

Mike Thompson's commentary:

When all is said and done the federal government may end up losing between $3 billion to $7 billion on the auto bailout, former Obama car czar Steven Rattner told Bloomberg radio earlier this week. While that kind of money is nothing to sneeze at, it pales in comparison to what the government would have been forced to shell out had General Motors and Chrysler gone belly up. A report from the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. estimates that the federal government would have wound up spending an additional $28.6 billion above and beyond what it ponied up for the auto bailout on unemployment benefits, Social Security and other and other programs for the estimated 1.4 million Americans who would have joined the unemployment rolls.

In an ideal world the government would recover every dime of taxpayer money it sunk into the struggling automakers. But for some perspective, compare estimated the $3 billion to $7 billion loss figure for preserving the lynchpin of American manufacturing to the $830 billion estimated cost of extending the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of Americans for the next decade, or the roughly $6 billion U.S. taxpayers throw each month into the rat hole known as Afghanistan.

A healthy GM and Chrysler will spur activity across the economy and feed tax coffers for decades to come (as will the more than one million Americans whose jobs were saved), and eventually offset any money the feds fail to recover now. As it turns out, government actually can do some things right.