How do bonuses equal to 50% of your annual salary sound?

Wait – how do they sound if you’re not receiving them – but paying for them? And (most likely) on salaries far greater than the one you’re currently earning.

(If you’re actually earning one – and not a member of the unfortunate and overly numerous unemployed.)

General Motors (Government Motors [GM]) in 2008 received Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) coin. TARP being the first of the giant government violations of the private sector – about which then President and capitalism assailant George W. Bush ridiculously said “I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system.”

These multi-trillion dollar government money anvils – TARP, the 2009 alleged “stimulus,” Cash-for-Clunkers, Cash-for-Caulkers, ad nauseum – have been repeatedly dropped on our collective economic heads.

Wonder why the national “recovery” has been so slow as to resemble non-existent? In large part because the private sector has been dragged into inertia by these serial Keynesian anchors.

Government Motors’ bailout was huge – $49.9 billion. They then got obnoxious and completely dishonest about it.

In April of last year, they paid for and copiously ran (again, with our money) a television advertisement in which then Chairman and CEO Ed Whitacre asserted “We have repaid our government loan in full, with interest, five years ahead of the original schedule.”

Ummm, no, they did not. They in fact paid only a tiny fraction thereof – and did so with other government money. It was a TARP money shuffle, a Boz Scaggs special.

So fraudulent was Government Motors’ media-buy proclamation that there has been a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) complaint filed against them.

As of November 16th – more than half a year after the “paid in full with interest” ad – Government Motors had only paid back $361 million.

Which takes us to now, and those uber-generous bonuses.

GM plans to pay bonuses to most managers equal to 15 percent to 20 percent of their annual salary and as high as 50 percent to less than 1 percent of its 26,000 U.S. salaried employees, said one of the people, who asked not to be named revealing internal plans….

How’d you all do bonus-wise this past year? I mean – those of you fortunate enough to have a gig. Those 9+% of you who are unemployed – and the 17+% who either don’t have or don’t have enough of a gig – surely didn’t enjoy such largess.

Meanwhile, Government Motors is rolling in your dough, and sloshing it around as if it didn’t cost them anything.

Because, after all, it didn’t.