Anyone here realize WE paid the 10 billion??
Yes and no.
It's true that the GM bailout resulted in a $10B loss, and that the auto industry component of TARP more generally (including Chrysler Group and Ally Financial as well as GM) resulted in an overall loss of something like $27B.
If you add in the $2.2B that Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac still owe the taxpayers it totals up at just under $30B in losses.
But, I don't think it's fair to take TARP and look at it in bits and pieces like that as anything more than a strictly academic endeavor.
After all, by way of analogy, you don't look at your stock portfolio in pieces or the profit/loss of individual brands or business units within a corporation in pieces.
In a very rough sense, you take the profits, you subtract the losses and the cost of doing business, and you arrive at your net income or loss.
So let's look at the other side of the ledger.
Between the banking component of TARP, currently a $25B profit, and the sale of AIG stock and non-core assets, a $23B profit, you've got an aggregate $48B profit set off by a $30B loss.
All told, the bailout returned a profit of $18 billion in cash to the American people, which doesn't account for the hundreds of thousands of jobs it saves at a point when America was shedding jobs at a cyclic rate.
Now, continuing the analogy, to look at GM as an individual stock purchase within a portfolio, or as an individual brand within a corporate stable, and say, "Yeah, it was a really bad idea to pump money into this activity", I agree. That dog just didn't hunt and it detracted from the profits/returns we might have enjoyed if we'd dome something different with that money.
On the face of things it appears that pumping money into the government-sponsored businesses and the businesses that are union-heavy manufacturing concerns was the bad investment on a strictly dollar-for-dollar basis.
Investing in financial services was a the smart move.
But to make the blanket statement, "WE paid that $10 billion", no. We didn't. We benefited from TARP in the long run in numerous ways.