According to the ever-enjoyable Wall Street Journal, General Motors may come away from its near-death experience with over $45 Billion in tax breaks on future profits over. Yes, that is Billion with a "B". How exactly did that happen?
Somewhere in the hubbub of GM's catastrophic nosedive into failure, paperwork was put in place to utilize a "tax-loss carry-forward" plan that uses deferred tax assets.
In plain terms, GM gets to put the value of the money the Old GM "lost" (or threw away) prior to and during its bankruptcy on a piece of paper and say it wants to reduce taxable income by that much. This, apparently, can be applied over the next twenty years.