Bush used TARP for the auto bailout in December 2008 December 19, 2008, a week after Republicans in the Senate had killed a bailout bill proposed by Democrats, saying it didn’t impose big enough wage cuts on the U.A.W., Bush unilaterally agreed to lend $17.4 billion of taxpayers’ money to General Motors and Chrysler, of which $13.4 billion was to be extended immediately. He had to twist the law to get the money. Deprived of congressional funding, he diverted cash from the loathed TARP program, which Congress had already passed, but which was supposed to be restricted to rescuing the banks. “I didn’t want there to twenty-one-per-cent unemployment,” he said to a meeting of the National Automobile Dealers Association in Las Vegas last month, explaining why he acted as he did. “I didn’t want history to look back and say, ‘Bush could have done something but chose not to do it.’ ”
