While I generally agree with your post, I just wanted to clarify that GM has actually lost about $18 billion (or $25 billion with today's figure) since 2004. T

While I generally agree with your post, I just wanted to clarify that GM has actually lost about $18 billion (or $25 billion with today's figure) since 2004. The rest of the 'loss' was simply a change in the accounting rules regarding how they valued pension and healthcare liabilities. So if you consider that $40-billion-or-so accounting change to be a loss, it was actually an accrued loss over a long period of time that was simply reported all at once. On the more general topic: I'm not a fan of bailing out companies either, but one has to be pragmatic and consider whether letting such a huge part of the nation's workforce become unemployed in an already-bad economy is wise. I think the better solution would be to let the companies go bankrupt, then create a massive program to retrain and re-employ the workers elsewhere (with unemployment pay contingent on showing up at training). The companies would eventually emerge from bankruptcy much smaller and healthier. This would allow them to focus on their electric car initiatives, and it would also allow them to fail without such dire consequences should they do so in the future.