President Obama Tells GM & Chrysler There's No Free Ride

During the Bush Administration when this bailout business got itself born, heaping gobs of money, billions of it, got handed out with seemingly few requirements in the way of accountability. You know, simple things like, "How are you spending the taxpayers' money?" or maybe "Do you think you ought not to throw that money away on non-essential non-operating expenses?" Think $400,000 vacations and AIG bonuses and golden parachutes, etc.

You think maybe when a loan is made to keep a business afloat then that business has a responsibility to come up with a business plan that will guide its own self out of failure?

That's the proposition President Obama put to GM and Chrysler, telling them that yes, they'd already been to the government gravy train for one installment of billions of dollars and now that they're back asking for billions more, he'd like to know and Congress would like to know and the American people (their creditors) would like to know exactly how do they plan to stay out of bankruptcy and forge forward into a more successful future?

Without that plan, President Obama is not going to throw good money after bad into a bottomless always-failing moneypit. He wants to know how they've planned and mapped out that more successful future before he is okay with shoveling billions more into their corporate coffers. I think that's rather sensible of him.

GM has already retooled it's Board of Directors and got itself a new chairman. Chrysler is pinning its hopes on a possible merger with Fiat. So there are glimmers of hope here.

I think it's about time the captains of industry behaved with at least as much common sense used by the average American working family when it comes to making a budget.

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