If I may, I would like to revert back to Super Bowl Sunday and mention the Clint Eastwood narrated Chrysler ad. I was sitting at a Super Bowl party when it came on and just made a side comment on how that particular situation is a horrible example to use to describe what America is about. The person next to me evidently did not hold the same position. They were kind of indifferent, just saying that they thought those companies were doing very well now and hadn’t they paid that money back anyways? I thought to myself, this is what is wrong with America. To the person I just kindly reminded them that GM paid off loans by applying for and getting more government loans and that we were losing our tax dollars in the process. She then changed the subject to all the people without jobs so I brought up the Keystone Pipeline as an example of how government bureaucracy is getting in the way of a certain job creator. She then defended the administration’s position that they needed more time to review it…that is until I brought up that it had been under review since 2008. I think at that time the game must have come back on…but back to my point.
In this particular game of pick the winner with Chrysler we the taxpayer ended up losing 1.3 Billion dollars. Back last July the government actually called this a success because they thought we were going to lose a lot more. But the losing or making of money with the deal is not the real issue, it is the fact that there was a deal at all. That the government actually owned a private industry company. This is about as un-American as you can possibly get and the fact that this does not seem to worry some people is pretty frightening in my eyes. In today’s world the consequences (even outside of the lost money) are very evident…even from a simple car commercial. Chrysler and Clint Eastwood have been fighting off attacks all week that the ads were political in nature in that they seem to support the auto bailouts. Eastwood said that he is “certainly not affiliated with Mr. Obama” and has donated the money he made to a charity. Chrysler is saying the same, but it is harder considering two of the members of the commercial team worked on projects for Obama’s first campaign. The reality is that it does not matter if the intention was political or not. Because the government intervened in an area that it should not have, that perception will always be there. Another reality is that with a current administration that it operating like paper trading venture capitalist, this perception is more than likely true. And this gives unheralded powers to a federal government that the founders believed should not be powerful at all.
