Scrivener.net

Greg Mankiw recalls the Obama Administration's promise to keep its "hands off" the management of Government General Motors, and notes how that's working.

But he doesn't get to this...

Mr. Gump and some 21,000 other salaried workers and retirees are furious that their roughly 46,000 union co-workers at Delphi have had their benefits restored, apparently with government largesse, and they have not...

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which insures pension plans, caps the amount of benefits it will pay, using a formula based on age and the type of benefits an employee earned. But in a side arrangement, G.M. is agreeing to pay special supplements, called top-ups, so that Delphi’s union retirees get everything they were promised.

The automaker is drawing the money from its own pension fund, according to a person familiar with the arrangement. In a sense, the G.M. pension fund is being weakened to help the Delphi union members.

Mr. Gump and others suspect the Treasury Department told G.M. to pay the supplements. The federal government is both the company’s largest shareholder and the financier of its restructuring, through the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Obama administration officials confirmed that they brought the parties together to negotiate a resolution of Delphi’s pension failure but said they did not dictate the outcome...

Well, they wouldn't have to "dictate" it, would they?

Mr. Beiter estimated that slightly fewer than half of Delphi’s white-collar retirees would have their pensions cut, by 30 to 70 percent. One woman in his area who had earned a pension of $2,925 a month checked with the Guaranty Corporation and was told her retirement check would be pared to $390...

Meanwhile the UAW at Ford rejects the contract that GM and Chrysler got via their government bailouts. So the government-owned, bailed out, and subsidized auto industry now is competing with a government-dictated contract advantage against the one Detroit car maker that did its job right, kept making a profit in hard times, and is still standing up all on its own. Who will you root for in this competition? (Remember that as a taxpayer you have $70 billion invested in GM and Chrysler.)

And as all this happens, the White House moves on from its battle with Fox News to attack Edmunds.com over its review of "Cash for Clunkers". Earlier, using Administration data, this blog estimated that each CfC car sale cost more than $13,000 -- Edmunds.com says $24,000, while the average price of a car was $27,000. Either way...

(With all the problems in the nation and the world to deal with, the White House can't make better use of its resources than to attack auto review sites?)