One of the recipients of those loan guarantees was Solyndra, a California solar panel company that initially looked promising but then went bankrupt in 2011. President Obama’s critics quickly turned that failure into one of the most potent political bludgeons of the 2012 presidential election. They hammered the president with millions of dollars in attack ads, criticizing the “wasteful” spending as a symptom of “crony capitalism” and “venture socialism.” Never mind that, on the whole, the loan guarantee program is projected to earn money for the federal government—one high-profile failure was
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