Ben Shoemate's Notebook

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If you're like me you're more than a little sick of GM's Ed Whitacre tv ad. So are more than a few U.S. Senators and lawmakers. From Fox:

General Motors has been running ads on all the major networks claiming the company repaid its $6.7 billion U.S. government loan "with interest five years ahead of the original schedule." General Motors Company CEO Ed Whitacre can be seen in the ad walking through an auto plant as he touts the company's progress.

But lawmakers, and even the inspector general for the bailout fund GM borrowed from, point out that General Motors only repaid the bailout money by dipping into a separate pot of bailout money. They say the company did not actually use its own earnings to make the early payment and are questioning why executives are making such a big deal out of it.

The workings of the bailout and what is actually being repaid and how are complex but simplified basically GM is repaying their "loan" with other money from the government, not from any actual earnings.

The $6.7 billion is also just a fraction of the $52 billion General Motors received in government aid. Grassley said lawmakers are being told government losses on GM are expected to exceed $30 billion.

The TARP inspector general, Neil Barofsky, bluntly told the Senate Finance Committee during a hearing last week that the repayment "is just other TARP money" and lawmakers should not "exaggerate" the feat.

"It sounds like they're kind of like taking money out of one pocket and putting it in the other to do that," Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., said at the hearing.

And of GM’s Vice Chairman Stephen Girsky:

General Motors admits that the company is repaying the loan with other government money, but says a year ago "nobody thought we'd be able to pay this back."

Gee, that's really reassuring.

Here's Ed Whitacre's complete ad, somewhat ironically titled "Trust":

The shelves in my office are overflowing with so many books that I’ve started hiding them other places around the house (the bathroom closest now has a complete set of the Harvard Classics).

My wife can’t understand why I need to keep buying even more books (and she doesn’t even know about the bathroom library yet) but now I have an excuse to justify my bibliophilism: The more books I have the better our kid will do in school.

After examining statistics from 27 nations, a group of researchers found the presence of book-lined shelves in the home — and the intellectual environment those volumes reflect — gives children an enormous advantage in school.

“Home library size has a very substantial effect on educational attainment, even adjusting for parents’ education, father’s occupational status and other family background characteristics,” reports the study, recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. “Growing up in a home with 500 books would propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average, than would growing up in a similar home with few or no books.

“This is a large effect, both absolutely and in comparison with other influences on education,” adds the research team, led by University of Nevada sociologist M.D.R. Evans. “A child from a family rich in books is 19 percentage points more likely to complete university than a comparable child growing up without a home library.”

This effect holds true regardless of a nation’s wealth, culture or political system, but its intensity varies from country to country. In China, a child whose parents own 500 books will average 6.6 more years of education than a comparable child from a bookless home. In the U.S., the figure is 2.4 years — which is still highly significant when you consider it’s the difference between two years of college and a full four-year degree.

By the way, if you talk to my wife, please don’t mention that whole “correlation doesn’t equal causation” thing to her.

(Via: Neatorama)