Barack Obama's plan to tax banks to get “our money back” seems to be little more than a political response to the public outrage over his bailout of undeserving banks, hedge funds, automakers, and homebuilders.
For the record, Obama voted for TARP as a Senator. As President, he has implemented other giveaway programs to banks, including near 0% interest rates, taxpayer guarantees of bank deposits and money market funds, the Term Asset Securities Loan Facility, and worst of all, the so-called Public Private Partnership Investment Program. Obama has defended all these actions as necessary to preventing a collapse of the financial system. Now he wants to tax and vilify the same institutions he has been propping up?
In recent days, Barack Obama gathered with House and Senate Democrats in the Cabinet Room of the White House to “negotiate” health care. They no doubt grew alarmed as Scott Brown surged in the polls, but they seemed strangely unaware that their very actions — meeting behind closed doors in a rump legislative conference from which Republicans were excluded — were fueling the outrage that would make possible a Brown victory.
Radio and television broadcasters - at least those catering to black and Hispanic audiences - soon may join financial services and auto manufacturers as the beneficiaries of a federal bailout. For the last half year, a group of executives of minority-themed media enterprises have been lobbying Capitol Hill to provide a boost to their money-losing operations. Having natural allies in the black and Hispanic congressional caucuses, they may win additional support from the Obama administration and any number of white lawmakers eager to expand their base of support. As it is, one of its key members already may have coaxed a loan modification from a financial giant.
One of the more entrenched principles in business is "pay for performance," the rewarding of executives with raises, bonuses and other forms of compensation if they meet or exceed expectations. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, now wards of the federal government, are negations of that principle. The troubled secondary mortgage lending giants, already having received more than $110 billion in federal subsidies since the fall of 2008, are set for another major feed at the public trough. On December 24, the U.S. Treasury Department, facing a December 31 deadline, 
When the Obama administration this past spring forced the bankrupt General Motors and Chrysler Corp. into virtual public receivership, officials justified the action as crucial to the survival of the auto industry and indeed the entire economy. Yet this unprecedented action has had several downsides, one of the less heralded of which has been the sudden vulnerability of current and retired employees who don't belong to a union. Case in point: the roughly 15,000 nonunion retirees of auto parts manufacturer and former GM subsidiary 
of General Motors and Chrysler this week has to qualify as one of the most radical moves in the history of American industry. Not only would the Obama administration effectively place these companies under Treasury Department receivership, it would give the United Auto Workers (UAW) a huge financial stake in their operations. Indeed, that would seem to be the point: The administration and organized labor embody the Democratic Party Left. What strengthens one strengthens the other.
If Barack Obama wants another trillion or more for toxic-asset purchases, what was the TARP for? The burden is on him and Timothy Geithner to explain why another Wall Street bailout will work when the previous ones have not. 
