Highway robbery

David Warren:

The figure of $1.4 million, for the amount of the taxpayers’ money that will be spent on saving each job at General Motors and Chrysler, has now appeared in the media. I have no idea whether it is accurate; more fundamentally, no idea how anyone could arrive at a plausible final reckoning, at the bottom of a sheet of wildly expensive variables.

What began as a $4-billion bailout, and was defended at that level by a prime minister who wrote and reasoned so eloquently against corporate bailouts when he was running the National Citizens Coalition, has blossomed within weeks into a $13.5-billion bailout. But once again, the taxpayers who must cover this — plus far more in compound interest, since the money must be borrowed — have and will have no way of knowing the total.

Government bailouts are unlimited, more or less by definition. For were a government to say, “You may have $13.5 billion, but after you’ve blown that in, you’re on your own,” it might as well say, “You may have zero.” Once the principle of fiscal accountability is abandoned, it is abandoned.

The political calculation is straightforward. The money is really going to save the seats of a few local MPs, at a cost of so many billion per seat for the next election. The joke is if they lose them anyway, we still have to pay.

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