So the important question is, will GM be among the problem children who actually dumps its pension obligations on the taxpayer? As luck would have it, GM's numbers are just out, and . . . um . . . they're losing a lot less money than they used to!!! Only $4.3 billion since they emerged from bankruptcy. And the CEO says they might even make a profit in the near future, maybe.

To be fair, that includes whopping dose of one-time charge. On the other hand, there's a lot of grim news lurking deeper in the reports, according to The Truth About Cars:

Of course, you have to dig into the numbers to find the bad news, like the $56.4b in "cost of sales," or the $700m interest cost, or the 48 percent North American capacity utilization in 2009, or the 16.3 percent US car market share.





Make no mistake, these companies are still on life support. The CBO expects that the lion's share of the government's losses on TARP will come, not from anything the Bush administration did, but from the Obama administration's decision to bail out the automakers and to a lesser extent, its bailout of homeowners. It seems that a big chunk of our cost may come from picking up the gold plated pensions . . . "Cadillac Plans", if you will . . . of the automakers. And lest you think I'm picking on unions over management, it was management that used the UAW as a prop to extract these gargantuan sums from the pockets of innocent taxpayers.

I feel like we ought to get a little something back, here. At the very least, they could offer everyone in America that OnStar service that sounds so great in the commercials.

(NAV Image Credit: GM Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com/flickr)