Posted on 01/15/2010 5:05:22 AM PST by Schnucki
“We want our money back,” Barack Obama has told US banks, announcing a levy on large financial institutions to help repay the notorious bailout he imposed last year. Oh, do “we”? And who gave away the taxpayers’ money in the first place, Mr President?
This pretended identification with Joe on Main Street is a favourite ploy of dodgy politicos with their backs to the wall – Wall Street, in this case, which is imminently expected to announce bonuses beyond the dreams of avarice, hence Obama’s nervous anxiety to be seen to be “doing something”. If Obama wants to see the taxpayers’ money repaid, that will take some doing, since the Tarp bailout cost America $700bn.
The new tax on top banks is expected to raise $90bn – over 10 years. So that is around $9bn a year. But Wall Street is poised to dole out $47bn in bonuses this year alone. If this is assumed to be a lean year, at a very conservative estimate bank bonuses are going to total $500bn over the 10 years that the Obama tax painfully claws back just $90bn for Joe Public. No wonder a financial strategist in New York has already described it as “petty theft from bank balance sheets”.
That is not very nice language. Since the purpose of this cosmetic exercise is to save the face of a President with minimal physiognomy still showing through the egg splattered over his features from just about every policy he has touched, we need a more user-friendly terminology. How about “Small change you can believe in”?
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.telegraph.co.uk ...
Went back to the TARP.
All this data, with amounts loaned and paid back is public.
What happened that was not supposed to happen was that the returned money is being used for other purposes. In other words it's a slush fund for Obama. Congress thought they had prohibited this but Obama is doing it anyway and the Dems are not acting to stop it.
Amen to that!
“What happened that was not supposed to happen was that the returned money is being used for other purposes. In other words it’s a slush fund for Obama.”
Thank you.
That was my point, thank you.
““The US taxpayer paid a lot to bail you banks out. Now we want the US taxpayer to pay the government what you banks owe.””
HA!
Excellent!
By the powers invested in me I hereby declare this Scotwife’s favorite post of the day.
In this specific case he looks better than Bush politically because they both look like they rewarded the evil banks who gave the big bonuses, but now Obama is standing up to them. CC reform was another winner as consumers (not me) hate them. In fact you can find FR posts with freepers bitching about them.
My favorite two issues were/are the stimulus and health reform because I knew they backfire on dems.
We want our money back
Yesterday, President Obama announced our proposed Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee on the country’s largest banks:
“My commitment is to recover every single dime the American people are owed. And my determination to achieve this goal is only heightened when I see reports of massive profits and obscene bonuses at some of the very firms who owe their continued existence to the American people...We want our money back, and we’re going to get it.”
The fee would recover every penny loaned to Wall Street during the financial crisis and stop the reckless abuses and excesses that nearly caused the collapse of our financial system in the first place.
But the banking industry — among the most powerful lobbies in Washington — is already launching attacks to stop Congress from enacting the proposal.
Barack and I aren’t backing down. But to win, we’ll need the American people to add their voice right away.
Thankfully, OFA supporters are already signing on to a bold statement of support: “We want our money back — and we stand with President Obama to make sure we get it.”
The proposal is expected to recoup billions from the big banks, most of it from the ten largest. As the President said, “If these companies are in good enough shape to afford massive bonuses, they are surely in good enough shape to afford paying back every penny to taxpayers.”
There is much more work to do to reform the financial system and create a new era of accountability. But the Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee is a crucial step. And with the banks already working to tear it down, I hope that I can count on you to speak out to show that Americans stand with us as we take them on.
Click here to add your name to the statement:
http://my.barackobama.com/Banks
Change isn’t easy, but it’s certainly worth fighting for. I’m glad you’re in this fight with us.
Thank you for making it possible,
Vice President Joe “Plugs” Biden
I am not defending GWB, but the trouble is that the companies that are not paying back the TARP money (AIG, GM) are not going to get charged, and the ones who paid it back, or didn't receive any TARP money at all, have to pay for the profligates' sins. I don't think that is too hard for the public to understand.
“I don’t think that is too hard for the public to understand. “
............ahem............... ;-)
We’ll see. The public can understand it if it makes the effort to do so. To put it another way, how will Obama explain why he is not charging fees to the ones who took the money and didn’t give it back?
Yes it is. Because that is was what TARP was all about in the first place. Helping the losers at the expense of the winners. So he makes the case that he taxes them when they make a profit after a bailout. You cant fee a company that you are still bailing out (that is the major flaw in this Republican talking point) because they make no profits.
To show you how this looks, Greta had Steven Moore on the past two nights (as every night) and asked him about this very subject. Each time he tried to make those republican points Greta cut him off and complained about the banks making profits off interest rates from taxpayers who bailed them out.
Republicans lost when they passed TARP. It killed any principle arguments. They gave Obama a blank check. Rab's and I were posting on this point today with some Bush-bots.
Who is getting the fee that got no bailout? That is one that can't easily defended by democrats.
Hmmm....I thought AIG was giving out bonuses.
To show you how this looks, Greta had Steven Moore on the past two nights (as every night) and asked him about this very subject. Each time he tried to make those republican points Greta cut him off and complained about the banks making profits off interest rates from taxpayers who bailed them out.
Good point. Greta makes a good prosecutor sometimes. (But I caught her letting off Steny Hoyer who repeated the myth about the NY 23rd under Repubs since the civil war. Sometimes she is too nice to big name politicians. Sent her an email.)
However, you should realize that Obama will not use the money collected to reduce the deficit, and these "temporary" fees will never end unless somebody stops them. I doubt that any Dem would ever stop them.
Republicans lost when they passed TARP. It killed any principle arguments. They gave Obama a blank check. Rab's and I were posting on this point today with some Bush-bots.
Bush signing the bill did assign some blame to him and the GOP (as I posted earlier on this thread), but I'm not going to absolve Obama for everything he does related to the TARP.
Who is getting the fee that got no bailout? That is one that can't easily defended by democrats.
Hey, I ain't no democrat. (Don't let MNJohnnie's demagoguery rub off on you :)
But since the bill hasn't been written yet, we don't know what will happen to it in the sausage making process.
Is there a big financial firm that did not receive TARP money and did not benefit from the TARP?
U.N.'s World Health Organization Eyeing Global Tax on Banking, Internet Activity
“We’ll see. The public can understand it if it makes the effort to do so.”
The public could have spent 2 hours on their PC’s in the summer of 08, and discovered that Obama was a communist from age 19, and that is close friends with 2 domestic terrorists....Dohrn and Ayers.
Obama never explains anything. He is a bare-faced liar. In his mind, the Constitution doesn’t exist, or at best is merely an obstacle to circumvent.
Fortunately, they have no power to do anything of the kind. Not yet, anyway ;-)
Yet, we still run into the Bush-bots (Rab's finds them with his posts) that still defend Bush. What did Bush stand for in the average citizens view? To them the above scenario is exactly the way America should work: capital gains tax cuts=free markets, bonuses =free markets, high yield risky investments=free markets, bonuses = free markets, but then when it all goes bad Bush just shovels out the taxpayers money like it's nothing..
These banks are not your local Mom and Pop hardware store turning a profit after being bailed out. They made money from LOW interest rates controlled by the federal reserve by charging higher interest rates after being bailed out. This is anything BUT free markets.
We are not saying we approve of Obama’s (these) actions, we are saying Bush paved the road for them, made them LOOK good. The taxpayers know someone has to pay. Bush was not the free Santa that claimed no one pays, he just made believe he was.
I agree. If we don't hold Republicans responsible for their sins, we become like the leftists who never find anything blameworthy in their own heroes.
A second point is whether the fees on banks are justified. I see a danger here: If I accept Obama's argument that anyone who he deems to be a beneficiary of govt. spending should have an IRS or regulatory target painted on his back, that puts us all in danger, since he is claiming that his spending "saved" millions of jobs.
Which brings me to the third point. Will the voters blame Obama for the bank fees? Again, no bill has been written yet, so we are shooting at an elusive target. I think if the fees are high enough to cause the banks to pass the cost on to consumers, or to make less money available for lending, and someone has the talent and resources to reveal that to voters in an effective way, he could pay a political price.
IIRC you made the point that since Obama has caused economic damage in so many other ways, even if it possible to attack him on bank fees, it may be smarter to spend political resources attacking him for other things like the Porkulus, and Obamacare along with their sleazy deals, and the deficit.
Ah, MNJohnnie. You are a puzzle to me. You are suspicious of someone's conservative credantials bacause they criticize Republicans. Everyone knows Obama is a radical communist. No need to waste much breath pointing that out. We've (thinking people) done the research. We knew who he was before the election. So much so, most of us pinched our noses and pulled the lever for McCain. We voted against O.
But unlike you, many here are conservatives. We have done the same research on the Bushes that we've done on O. Bush senior, Establishment's Man is a liberal. He was a pragmatic globalist who handed us Clinton. You probably already know that he was our first President to openly invite homosexual groups to the Whitehouse.
Likewise, his idiotHarvard graduate son is a globalist big government progressive. Defend this W quote (as a conservative): "I readily concede I chucked aside my free market principles to save the free market".
The Bushes are not friends of the religious right. They are not even pro-life. As a pro-lifer, however, I was all for them because I vote the issues and they PANDERED to me.
Now, I concede: At least the Bush globalists wanted a New World Order where America was in control of the World Government. But YOU have to concede: Bush (daddy and boy both) is NOT a conservative. Now the HUGE government machine he helped create is able to be turned on us by the Marxist radicals who are in control. But unlike the Bush globalists, the Marxists hate America, and envision a world government where America is totally gone.
Ask yourself a simple question: Would the Marxists we now serve have been able to so efficiently collapse our monetary system if W had not attacked our currency so effectively to begin with? Do you think Paulson would have been able to point a gun at the heads of 9 bankers and make them take TARP money under Reagan?
My FRiend, you've been duped by the globalists into thinking R is right, when in reality R is up, D is down, and BOTH parties have moved us drastically LEFT (huge, huge government), as we've tried voting the lesser evil...and rest assured, the lesser evil is still very, very evil.
Oh, and MNJohnnie, I commend you on the use of the word "specious". While posturing as conservatives, it lets us all take you a little more seriously.
You miss MNJohnnie’s point completely. It’s not ‘what they do’ but ‘who they are’. If a democrat does something bad it’s evil it’s because he has bad intentions. The fact the Bush did the same thing before him is irrelevent, he had good intentions but got bad advice, tried to make democrats love him, bla-bla-bla so that is OK.
You have to pick sides and lie to defend yours. Having principles means being the enemy of bots like MNJohnnie;.
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