The New York Times is reporting that President elect Barack Obama may have found a way to get the remaining $350 billion of TARP money…he’s going to promise to use it properly. Already Republicans are starting to cave:
South Dakota Republican Sen. John Thune said a public statement might be helpful in easing the concerns of some Republicans and South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint said he believed such a statement would be made by Obama’s team.
As of this point, no one can tell us how the first $350 billion was used. No one can tell us what benefit it provided. Further, Treasury is still fighting lawsuits to release information on how they used $2 trillion. Finally, we’ve got Obama continuing to negotiate an increasing stimulus package, now reported to be $850 billion, with no real detail but cries of “it’s not big enough.”
With what we’ve seen on how all of the various “bailouts” have been handled to date, we’re now supposed to believe that an “assurance” from Obama will cause transparency and integrity to shoot forth from this next tranche?
It’s more and more obvious that some of the Senate Republicans are out of touch with the world outside of the beltway. If they were paying attention they would know that all of Obama’s commitments have all been determined to have an expiration date on them. It seems that the day from statement to expiration is decreasing along with the days to Obama’s inauguration.
While the Senate Republicans may get bamboozled by:
reassurances the money would be focused on trying to fix the financial industry crisis that has also left millions of families experiencing home foreclosures,
you’ll pardon me if I don’t hold my breath to see it happen, even if it’s only for just five more days!
