The New Bank Tax by Gregory Hilton

Obama’s new bank tax was announced during the State of the Union Address and it will inevitably be passed on to consumers. The President says this is a way to recoup money dished out to banks as part of the TARP bailout. The truth, though, is that those banks already paid-back the bailouts, with interest; the real deadbeat offenders are Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Chrysler and General Motors, who have yet to repay their debt. This chart demonstrates who has paid. Obama is taxing those who paid back taxpayers, and exempting those who have not. Businesses passing on costs to their consumers is an Economics 101 principle which is unkown to an administration where only 5% of the decision makers have ever held a job in a profit making business.
The GM’s exemption is the result of a failure to change the original legislation. It mandated that if any TARP was not recouped by the resale of the “troubled assets”, the deficit would come from the financial industry. This meant GM was exempted since the money used to nationalize most of that company was taken from the fund originally designed for bad mortgage loans and to keep derivatives off the market.

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