Michiganders in particular remain in denial about the GM bailouts.
Jim Geraghty here for National Review throws some cold water in our faces:
GM continued to make cars with a life-threatening defect during the era of government ownership. Joe Biden liked to boast, “Osama bin Laden is dead and GM is alive!” Indeed he is dead, and so are 13 people who were involved in car accidents linked to a defective ignition switch. ...
The New York Times reported that engineers at GM reviewed data in the black boxes of Chevrolet Cobalts at a meeting on May 15, 2009, and confirmed that the potentially fatal defect existed in hundreds of thousands of cars. The Obama administration and GM’s management finalized the terms of the bailout at the end of that month. It’s not yet clear who at GM knew this shocking and scandalous information, but at least some GM employees knew they were selling dangerous cars at the precise moment they were asking for taxpayer money to stay in business. ...
[T]he Obama administration’s Departments of Transportation and Justice came down like a ton of bricks on a Japanese automaker about unproven allegations of defects, while the government-owned American company continued to make and sell cars with proven potentially fatal defects, even after the chief of the NHTSA’s Defects Assessment Division twice proposed investigations.
The U.S. government sold its last shares of GM stock in December 2013; some have asked whether the government did so knowing the recall would be announced in February 2014.
