GM Could Be Free of Taxes for Years ($45 billion tax break)

Wall Street Journal ^ | November 3, 2010 | RANDALL SMITH and SHARON TERLEP

[zeugma]

However this seems to be a unique case. The stockholders got completely screwed. Their old stock became worthless. I can see the point where you could say that these tax credits belonged to them, and since they no longer have any interest in GM, those tax credits no longer belong to this new GM. But I don't see any efforts by the government to transfer those tax credits over to the stockholders they screwed over, and I see absolutely no reason the government should just make those tax credits disappear. It's just a multibillion dollar money grab by the government.

I think we're both mostly on the same page with this. Like you, I don't like to see the government get a windfall profit off the dissolution of the company. However, I think I don't want the union to profit from their immoral deal with the devil even more.

That makes sense, because I don't see how they could so thoroughly screw over the stock holders and secured debt holders and still have it be the same company. I really don't understand how this was remotely legal anyway.

It wasn't legal. The problem though, is that the government has guns and is willing to use them at the drop of a hat. (This is the main difference between us and them. We have guns, but aren't willing to kill indiscriminately.) Thos involved understand the level the game was being played at, and largely swallowed their losses because the understood the consequences of not doing so.