After the last-second addition of another $20 billion in new taxes shattered their original coalition for passage, the majority in the Senate went back to the drawing board to identify a new way to pay for the Dodd-Frank “orderly liquidation” fund.
The result of their leftist brainstorming session? Using the “profits” from the TARP bailout to pay for future Dodd-Frank financial fiascoes. The left and their allies want us to believe this would mark “the end” of TARP. The New York Times reports:
The new plan would bring an early end to the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the mammoth financial system bailout effort enacted in 2008, and redirect about $11 billion toward heightened regulation of the financial industry.
This bill does not end TARP and it does not end bailouts. Dodd-Frank supporters are now pretending that the TARP funds were going to be re-loaned out and then give themselves credit for not doing something they weren’t going to do in the first place.
A slightly more honest approach to the funding would have been to reprogram stimulus money, but that was defeated in favor of this pretend funding. But more importantly, this “tax” was just one of many, many reasons to oppose the bill. It was added at the end of the process to deal with budget concerns. Taking it out does not make this a good – or even a better – bill. Again, this is a minor issue in a huge bill filled with huge problems. The Wall Street Journal adds:
Most absurd is the claim that any of this money, however it is raised, will somehow be reserved for bank failures. Congress will spend it immediately. Taxpayers will pay for bailouts like they always do, when they happen, and this bill makes them more likely.
