It's as though you and I live in a different country from our largest financial institutions.
We helped to build those financial institutions. But now we've become the poorer country next door to rich and powerful nation with a lousy gambling habit. When it loses, it reaches into our pockets to maintain its life-style. Its leadership simply crosses the border and takes what it needs. Time for payback.
President Obama will try to recoup for taxpayers as much as $120 billion of the money spent to bail out the financial system, most likely through a tax on large banks, administration and Congressional officials said Monday. ...
... The general idea is to devise a levy that would help reduce the budget deficit, which is now at a level not seen since World War II, and would also discourage the kinds of excessive risk-taking among financial institutions that led to a near collapse of Wall Street in 2008, the officials said.
But the president also has a political purpose — to respond to the anger building across the country as big banks, having been rescued by the taxpayers, report record profits and begin paying out huge bonuses while millions of Americans remain out of work. ...NYT
What the White House is proposing is pretty smart and on point politically. It' s talking about levying a tax on "based on the size and riskiness of an institution’s loans and other financial holdings, or a tax on profits."
Now the banks are playing all indignant.
Lobbyists for bankers, taken by surprise, immediately objected to any new tax. ...“It is perplexing to us,” said Edward L. Yingling, president and chief executive of the American Bankers Association.
Tough titties, Yingling! Time for bankers to pay us back for the indignities and cruelties so many of us have suffered thanks to your raiding of our treasuries. Turnabout is fair play.
Note: Not all banks would be subjected to the proposed tax. Community banks didn't cause the breakdown of the largest financial institutions. They were victims of it.
