Covering For Past Mistakes

Why President Obama's going nowhere fast budget would cost taxpayers even more:

Chief among the problems with Obama’s refinancing ideas is that the budget renews calls for a bank tax as a way to help pay for the latest housing initiative. It is a funding idea that has repeatedly gone nowhere on Capitol Hill and has even worse chances of moving in a divided Congress in an election year.

The proposed fee would generate $61 billion over 10 years. The budget said the fee would help “offset the cost of the President’s new, broad-based mortgage refinancing program which is designed to help homeowners who are still suffering as a result of the financial crisis.”

The big banks are blamed for helping fuel the financial crisis and for benefiting from the 2008’s Troubled Asset Relief Program emergency $700 billion financial bailout, so the fee is envisioned to help make up these costs.

But the administration’s goal of spending all of the $45.6 billion set aside for housing initiatives under TARP will likely drive up the ultimate cost to taxpayers of the TARP program to $68 billion from last year’s projected $48 billion.

For someone who always talks about how he "inherited this mess," he sure seems to love wanting others to pay for it...