Chevy Volt: The Only $41,000 Car In the World That Leases for $350/mo., Courtesy of... You

According to Investors Business Daily, the special inspector general overseeing the TARP bailout says that GM and its lending arm still owe taxpayers more than $40 billion.

GM ... still owes more than half the $50 billion in federal funds it received when the combination of the recession and its costly union contracts drove it into bankruptcy. And its lending arm, GMAC (now Ally Financial), still owes $14.5 billion...

...What's worse, it's not clear that GM actually repaid what it's gotten credit for repaying. Check out this note buried in the inspector's report: "As part of a credit agreement with Treasury, $16.4 billion in TARP funds were placed in an escrow account that GM could access only with Treasury's permission."

As it turns out, GM got Treasury's OK to "repay" more than $6.7 billion "using a portion of the escrow account that had been funded with TARP funds." So GM is merely paying the government back with government money, not money GM is earning selling cars, as the administration has claimed.

Worse, GM in effect is still borrowing money. Consider this item from the report: "What remained in escrow was released to GM." Bottom line: Taxpayers have not been paid back and are still on the hook as GM continues to require government help. Yet Obama has hailed the GM bailout as the signature achievement of his big government programs.

As if to illustrate the administration's lies, a friend checked out a lease on a Chevy Volt (MSRP: $41,000). He reported back that the car leased out at $350 a month for 36 months!

I figured he had to be lying. After all, he's a Dem. But, it turns out, he wasn't fibbing a bit.

...although most of the world will surely report on how the Volt MSRP of $41,000 puts it out of the reach of the average consumer, ... the real story is the fact that, if you lease the Volt, it will cost you the same as leasing a LEAF: $350 a month for 3 years.

That certainly makes things interesting, doesn't it?

...So how did GM make the Volt available for the same lease price as the LEAF given that the Volt's base MSRP is $8,000 higher than the LEAF's? For starters, when you lease a plug-in car from a manufacturer, the manufacturer can take the available $7,500 federal tax credit for themselves and roll that into paying down the MSRP. Add to that the Volt's $2,500 down payment, and now you're paying a lease on a $31,000 vehicle instead of $41,000...

The magic all comes down to the manufacturer's calculated residual value—how much they think the car will be worth at the end of the lease. GM has made the calculation that the Volt will maintain a very high value over the first three years of its life. As a result, GM has effectively engineered a situation where the vast majority of Volt buyers will decide to lease the car. Twinges of the EV1 days will surely flit through the minds of the old school California mandate folks when GM took all the EV1's back at the end of their leases and crushed them...

In other words, GM loses money on every car, but they make it up in volume.

Or, by filching money from the taxpayers while claiming all of their loans were repaid.

This, my friends, is lawlessness, but not unexpected coming from the parasites infesting the Democrat Party.