Government ends TARP, makes $15.3 billion profit

[bedstuy]

Plus, my point about regulatory growth still stands.

No.  Also, a profoundly misleading statistic and it betrays a lack of understanding of what a regulation is.  There are regulations that impose a new significant burden on industry.  There are new regulations that basically just update old regulations.  And, there are regulations, most of them, that do things like set out a filing deadline or a list of definitions.  So, it's ridiculous to lump them all together or act like these are all laws that restrict freedom.  A regulation on point-source mercury emissions can be a matter of costing or saving billions of dollars and many people's health/lives.  A regulation about how to file something properly is something quite different.

And, on your specific point, you're also lying with a graph.



As you can see, regulations have grown at a linear rate over time.  Is that a function of different policy or the fact that we keep passing more legislation and adapting to new situations over time?

[bedstuy]

I'm interested in looking at the $15 billion relative to the government budget - in budget terms, it's essentially zero, no? But it's still a good number and I'm glad that we ended out TARP this way.

Props to President Bush and the President for doing this, although I didn't agree with the auto bailout (at the time. But they made it work).

Why props to President Bush?

Didn't he appoint a Treasury Secretary who botched the initial steps of the financial crisis, partially out of his conflicts of interest (being a former Goldman chairman)? 

Didn't he exercise no leadership during the crisis and essentially hand everything off to Paulson and Pelosi? 

Didn't he run the SEC which failed over and over again to police Wall Street?

Let's not re-write history.  Pelosi passed TARP with only 19 Republican votes.   10 Democrats voted against vs. 156 Republicans.  Republicans put bumpersticker populism before reality.  They wanted to get the benefit of TARP saving the economy, but campaign against bailouts.  It was a huge indictment of Republicans and how they have a militant dishonesty and disrespect for this country.  And, still to this day, Republicans live in a fantasy land where the financial crisis was caused by cabal of poor people buying houses in Florida. 

When it comes to actually making tough, reality-based choices that benefit this country and having political courage, there's only one party in America right now. 

[bedstuy]

TARP is a Bush Administration initiative ... I credited President Bush because he signed it into law, and his Treasury Department created the program (and he pushed for it). Paulson was actually instrumental to TARP, Pelosi helped whip votes, but the TARP program was a creation of the Bush Treasury department. Kind of "The Bush Administration was responsible for it" and thus "credit to President Bush."

I'm not addressing the rest of the campaign style rhetoric you're putting in there, but I credited Bush simply because his Treasury Department came up with it, he pushed the bill, and he signed it and gave it his support. I also credited President Obama for sticking with it.

Not only that, in the second House vote, 91 Republicans voted yes for the bill on the second try (where it passed 263-171). I'm sure much of that was because of the Bush Administration whipping the bill, along with Pelosi.

This was not designed to be a partisan shot at either party.

The actual details of TARP were created by career employees of Treasury.  Those are non-political people, so how do you give politicians credit for their work? 

[bedstuy]

Uh by that standard a lot of work in Washington is done by career workers in the various agencies (true) and we shouldn't credit political leaders when they pass things (not true). It seems you just want a reason to not credit President Bush for TARP and that's fine bit he and the Treasury Department had involvement. They reviewed the proposal and sent it to Capital Hill.

One career staffer involved in this was Neel Kashkari, who was the Republican nominee for California Governor, by the way

Right.  You judge a President based on what they did, not what happened during their term in office.  For example, you don't criticize FDR for the start of WWII or praise Bill Clinton for the peace dividend.     

George W. Bush was so destroyed as a political figure and a leader that he played essentially no role in dealing with the financial crisis.  He couldn't get his party in line to vote for TARP and he didn't reassure the markets or make any brave or significant decisions.  He just happened to be the President who had to sign legislation that any sane President would have signed.  It was either TARP or the total meltdown of the world financial system.  That's a no-brainer, which is fortunate because we're talking about George W. Bush. 

The other point is that treasury only needed TARP because they made huge mistakes at the outset.  Namely, they let Lehman Brothers go under which set off a chain reaction which would have sent us to something much worse than the Great Depression.  So, the top policy makers screwed up royally with their initial judgement and then recovered with amazing work of career treasury and Federal Reserve employees.  So, how do you score that?  The decisions George W. Bush actually made backfired horribly and the diligent work of other people bailed our country out. 

[bedstuy]

We'll agree to disagree. I feel your argument falls too close towards selective bias - e.g, picking career workers to reap the credit and political leaders the blame for poor decisions based on subjective metrics. In turn, I think while Bush was not perfect, I believe the financial crisis' origins was out of his hands for much of his tenure as President. So I can't fault him as much as others would.

But we can agree to disagree.

I don't fault Bush for the financial crisis.  There's a lot of blame to go around and most of it goes to the financial industry.  Nobody really saw the crisis coming to the extent it happened and it was part of a much larger trend. 

But, I grade his decisions for what they were and he didn't help solve the problem, except that he happened to be President so he had to sign legislation, as any sane President would have done.  He certainly didn't help by appointing Hank Paulson and keeping the SEC weak and feckless during his administration.  He certainly didn't show any leadership or rally anyone.  The key decision makers were Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner, not George W. Bush.  There's no real credit that belongs to President Bush and there's some amount of blame.

You can disagree with those conclusions, but facts are facts.  You can't just give someone credit because they happened to be President while someone in the government found a solution to a problem.

[bedstuy]

Plus, my point about regulatory growth still stands.

No.  Also, a profoundly misleading statistic and it betrays a lack of understanding of what a regulation is.  There are regulations that impose a new significant burden on industry.  There are new regulations that basically just update old regulations.  And, there are regulations, most of them, that do things like set out a filing deadline or a list of definitions.  So, it's ridiculous to lump them all together or act like these are all laws that restrict freedom.  A regulation on point-source mercury emissions can be a matter of costing or saving billions of dollars and many people's health/lives.  A regulation about how to file something properly is something quite different.

Alright, I see what you're saying. Here's a chart for economically significant regulations:

Two points:

How much of that increase is just because of the ACA and Dodd Frank? 

What is economically significant?  And, how many of those regulations are significant in that they have tremendous benefits?  It's easy to count the cost of a new scrubber for a coal plant against a regulation, but what about the attendant economic benefits from improving the environment and public health?