What do you think President Obama would have to say about a huge American company that earned a whopping $7.6 billion last year and didn’t pay a penny in taxes to Uncle Sam?
What would the president say on the stump if he could single this company out as an evil outsourcer, since nearly two-thirds of its employees work overseas?
What if this company was sitting on $30 billion in cash and securities, rather than using that money to hire US workers?
What if, instead of paying taxes, this company gave out more than $300 million last year in bonuses?
Surely such a company would be made an example of before the American electorate, right?
No. In fact, dead wrong.
That company is General Motors, and it has remarkably become the centerpiece of the Obama pitch for a second term.
How so? Well, here’s the Obama economic plan as outlined last week in a Colorado speech: “I believe in American workers,” Obama told the crowd. “. . . And now the American auto industry has come roaring back, and GM is number 1 again. . . . I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs — not just in the auto industry, but in every industry.”
Really? If GM were truly so successful why are it and its finance arm (once GMAC, but now known as Ally) two ot the few companies that haven’t fully paid back their billions in TARP loans?
Why has its stock fallen 38 percent since its vaunted return in late 2010, while the S&P 500 has risen by about 8 percent? Why is GM losing market share this year while its Japanese competitors and even Chrysler (you know, the one the Obama administration let be sold to an Italian company) are actually the ones “roaring back”?
Yet GM is the template on which Obama wants to model the future of our economy — in “every industry.”
Looked through that prism, it’s easy to understand why Team Obama thinks GM does indeed make the perfect engine — an engine that takes billions from the taxpayers and redistributes it to tens of thousands of union employees.
As GM goes, so goes the nation? That’s the Obama mantra. What we desperately need is a president who forgets that old saw and tries to replicate the remarkable success of companies such as Apple instead.