Chrysler repays Uncle Sam $7.5 billion – early
Shhhhh! Do you hear that? Neither do I. I’m talking about reaction from critics of the auto bailout to news that Chrysler will pay back the $7.5 billion that it borrowed from taxpayers of the United States and Canada. Chrysler is raising the cash to pay back its government loans through a combination of bond sales, a commercial loan and a cash infusion from its partner Italian automaker Fiat…
Granted, all this constitutes a refinancing of Chrysler’s debt and the company is far from being out of woods – it still owes the $7.5 billion. But the fact that an automaker that had been given up for dead a few years ago is now healthy enough to convince private investors to pony up billions is a positive sign. And the chief issue among bailout critics wasn’t the long-term survival of Chrysler (they were willing to let the automaker die after all) but whether the company could ever pay back the money it borrowed from the government. Well, it just did.
So Chrysler lives to fight another day, thousands of Americans keep their jobs and the company continues to expand and post profits. Which is good news, unless you are a Toyota state Senator, are paid by a think tank to opine that government can never do anything right, or are an ideologue who’s genetically incapable of uttering the word “government” without immediately blurting out the word “boondoggle.”
Ideologue being the operative word in my humble experience. Usually, the sloganeer is someone who could care less about the lot of someone who spent decades in an auto plant – overpaid for all the fun he had schlepping fenders onto a Chrysler chassis.
Nope. I have a lot more sympathy for the folks who spent a significant portion of their lives in the not-so-healthy atmosphere of an American factory instead of the ivory tower that makes some people “superior” to those getting a paycheck for manual labor.
