October 15, 2012

Troubling Auto-Rescue Plunder (TARP)

By Randall Hoven
Remember that "trillion-dollar bank bailout" that President Bush pushed four years ago?  The Congressional Budget Office now says that (1) it cost just $24 billion, nowhere near a trillion; (2) taxpayers made money from the banks; and (3) the vast majority of the money went to auto companies. Don't call it a trillion-dollar bank bailout.  Call it the $20-billion UAW payoff. The CBO's numbers are summarized it in a table. So we taxpayers made $11B from banks, not the other way around.  You know something funny about that?  When the TARP money first flowed out of government and into the banks, Democrats counted that as adding to Bush's deficit.  But when that money flowed back into U.S. coffers, Democrats kind of forgot about it.  As humongous as Obama's 2010-2012 deficits have been, they would have been about $200B bigger if not for TARP. All the TARP money, and then some, will have gone to purposes that had nothing to do with the original TARP rationale:...(Read Full Article)