[what's up]

It was sold to shore up the banks ‘right now’ or else our whole banking system would collapse. As the debate continued on for several weeks, I began to have misgivings. The real kicker, even after it was passed, they didn’t spend most of it for months.

You were correct in your first assumptions about TARP.

Without it, banks were reeling and about to go over the edge. Without TARP, Moragan Stanley was about to go down immediately. Goldman would have followed. Along with TARP, MS was saved by doing a lie-saving deal with Mitsubishi Bank in Japan which would never have happened if TARP hadn't happened to restore overseas' investor confidence.

It wasn't so much that every dollar had to be spent; instead it was instilling the idea that Gov't was going to be there at that time. This didn't happen in '29 and it was what caused things to go out of control there. Bush was right about TARP and the fact that a large majority of it has been paid back makes the nay-sayers wrong about their screams that the money would never be seen again.

Now, those who used TARP as justification to go into MORE debt...that's another story...

[DoughtyOne]

I’m willing to listen to your version. I’m not totally convinced you’re wrong, so don’t take my response that way.

Where you lose me is when you claim it was almost all paid back. It doesn’t seem that the accumulate national debt figures reflect this.

To the contrary, Bush is faulted for massive spending his last two years in part on TARP, and he even arranged another $300 million for Obama so he could hit the ground running. Obama promptly spent that and moved on to a stimulus bill for another $1 trillion dollars.

These three measures are a large portion of how we moved from around $9 trillion in debt to 13 now 14 trillion.

These account for 40% of our recent debt increased from late 2008 until now.