Three years after being rescued by a bailout, General Motors last week announced some rather ambitious profit targets for 2012. But even if it meets these targets – a big if – taxpayers should not wait to recover their remaining “investment” in the company.

There is no doubt that GM has returned from the brink. It made $8 billion last year, a record high, and regained enough global market share to once again become the world’s biggest automaker. More impressive, it is planning to bump its profit margins from 6 percent to 10 percent. This, it hopes, will allow it to post $10 billion in profits this year, something that only 17 public companies managed to do in 2010.

How did investors react to all this hope and cheer? With a giant yawn: GM’s stock price, which has been hovering around $25 for months, barely budged. That’s $30 below what’s needed for taxpayers to recover the $30 billion they still have stuck in the company.

If investors aren’t buying GM’s rosy scenarios, it’s for some good reasons. Peter De Lorenzo, editor of Auto Extremist, notes that GM is facing the most competitive market in history and investors are dubious that it can deliver. GM’s profits last year resulted partly from the tsunami in Japan that disrupted Toyota and Honda’s global supply chain. Both are back this year and more formidable than ever.

GM’s sales in China are also slowing. And Europe will probably remain a trouble spot. GM suffered $2 billion in losses in Europe last year, thanks to Opel, its hopelessly bloated German brand. But GM has been unable to obtain permission from the German government to restructure its labor costs, even as European sales plummet.

Toyota and Honda don’t have the same exposure in Europe and hence have less to worry about. What’s more, GM’s global pension obligations are underfunded to the tune of $22 billion.

If GM manages to address all these issues, notes Sean McAlinden of the Center for Automotive Research, its share price might go up $40 to $45, leaving taxpayers $5 billion to $8 billion in the red. But that’s the best scenario. If stock prices remain at the $25 level, the losses could mount up to $15 billion. That’s not counting the $15 billion in tax write-offs that GM got as part of the bankruptcy deal. In all, taxpayers are facing somewhere from $20 billion to $30 billion in losses.

That’s not all. The GM bailout has distorted the field so badly that competitors are demanding their own handouts to even things out.

For example, McAlinden notes, the administration gave GM about $10 billion more than was strictly necessary to finance its bankruptcy. The money contributed to GM’s nice $33 billion cash cushion right now. GM could use this money to buy its own stock and bid up prices, mitigating taxpayer losses – or pay dividends. But McAlinden doesn’t believe that’s what GM will do. It could use the money to pay off its obligations to the union health-care trust fund, making this a direct infusion of cash from taxpayers to unions.

Or it will use the money toward product development, putting its competitors at a disadvantage. Moreover, because all but $10 billion of the bailout money GM got was in the form of equity, the company has no debt service costs. Ford, by contrast, is still servicing the $23 billion in debt it took to avoid a bailout.

This is unfair, and the Obama administration knows it, which is perhaps one reason it quickly approved a $5.6 billion retooling loan for Ford. That, in turn, elicited howls of protest from Chrysler’s Sergio Marchionne. The administration gave Marchionne’s parent company, Fiat, the majority stake in Chrysler without asking Fiat to contribute a single euro.

Yet Marchionne complains that the administration hasn’t been generous enough. In contrast with GM, it forced Chrysler to service the bailout loan. Now it’s dragging its feet in approving Chrysler’s new retooling loans, he claims.

Bailout supporters maintain that it was a one-time deal necessary to shore up companies in acute economic times. In reality, the rush for the bailout’s spoils has produced ripple effects that may well haunt the economy for a long time.

As President Obama campaigns, he will spin the bailout as a success that saved millions of American jobs. But taxpayers should bear in mind that the hit to their wallets will be substantial and will probably grow.