Not At All Surprising: TARP Is Ripe For Fraud
from the gee...-you-think? dept
One of our complaints with the massive outlay of government spending through things like TARP and the "stimulus plan" is that they were both rushed through with little thought or oversight -- and no chance for those outside of Washington to weigh in on those plans. I'm not necessarily against all such spending, but history has shown that rushing into such spending without having a chance to think through the details is a recipe for disaster. Already, we've seen that the government has massively overvalued some assets and that the promised "transparency" has been lacking. Now, even the guy in charge of making sure that the TARP program isn't abused is admitting that, with the way it's been set up, the program is ripe for fraud. He's expecting the government to be bilked out of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars in criminal schemes, and notes that less than 5% of those receiving funds from TARP have fulfilled their obligations in letting the government know what's been done with the money. I keep hearing that the government had to do something, but that doesn't mean we needed to hand over trillions of taxpayer money in such a haphazard fashion.
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Accountability
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Taxpayer Anal Rape Program
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Not to be repetitive
So the question becomes, for those gaming the funds, who will miss this 4 inches, Or that 16 inches, when there are 63 MILES of $1000 bills.
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YES! for Accountability!
In short, screw up and you yourself go broke. How many politicians would support pork bills with nothing but junk in them once that was enacted? Ya, none.
Can we do this now, please?
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Re: YES! for Accountability!
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Obligatory joke
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Recall misused bank bailout
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Re: Recall misused bank bailout
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Re: Re: Recall misused bank bailout
Who's the bigger idiot? The guy who bought a $400K house or the idiot who lent him the money? The real question is who should have known better, and that is clearly the bank who gave him the loan. Banks thru away all their lending standards for greed and they should pay the price.
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No kidding?
As the article by George Reisman points out (http://mises.org/story/3353) our economic system is not functioning correctly because of loss of capital, which is accumulated "...on a foundation of saving."
"Saving does not mean not spending. It does not mean hoarding. It means not spending for purposes of consumption. Abstaining from spending for consumption makes possible equivalent spending for production. Whoever saves is in a position to that extent to buy capital goods and pay wages to workers, to lend funds for the purchase of expensive consumers' goods, or to lend funds to others who will use them for any of these purposes."
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TECH-dirt?
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Re: TECH-dirt?
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Stimulus is better than TARP, Iraq
With TARP, the tax money helps some rich guys stay rich.
Still, I prefer TARP to the Iraq war, where my tax money destroys infrastructure and lives.
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Re: Stimulus is better than TARP, Iraq
This is, in my humble opinion, a big assumption. A point of this is a need to accomplish redical transparency...transparency is also as noted in the links above. Personally, I'm skeptical that much of the "simulus" is to benefit taxpayers. Sure, it will a little, but it seems to be pennies of benefits to us vs. dollars of benefit to the policiticans' "hey, lookie what I did" fund. Wouldn't it be good to have the authors of the bill, and those who voted for it, but praised, or dinged, if it doesn't meet it's stated goals (assuming there are event goals documented...which I'm not clear they are)?
As a side note, I like rich people...they employ me. But alas, there are bad apples in every bunch.
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For example, after hurricane Katrina, we gave out $2000 debit cards for people to buy food. Of course, some of those people used the money to buy TVs. Also, since it was important to get those debit cards out really fast, you have to assume that some people are going to get debit cards that really don't deserve them. Sure, you could add more red tape to the process, but that just increases the amount of time it takes for real victims to buy food. You have to have a certain amount of trust in people and accept a certain amount of loss, if you want to get relief to victims quickly. Otherwise, you just slow down the process without really saving any money.
TARP is really the same thing except that we're handing out multi-million dollar debit cards to corporations. Of course there's going to be waste, people getting money that don't deserve it, and people using the money to buy things other than the intended purpose. If you want the money to get out quickly, that's the way it had to happen. Anything else just slows down the process and adds expensive bureaucracy that doesn't save much money anyway. Sure, we can go after those that really did commit some sort of fraud, but did you really expect anything different? Do you really expect more oversight to save that much money?
The money should never have been given out in the first place. Asking why there wasn't *more* government oversight to make things *cheaper* is just silly.
You can't have things fast, cheap, and good. You can only pick two.
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Re:
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In this way, the heavy lifting part of the problem is divided among everyone who cares to spend time on the task. It would also restore public confidence and give everyone out of work something to put on their resume as having done.
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We want to hold the banks responsible for the tax dollars given them? Why didn't the douchbags sitting in that room already do that? We want to reduce the deficit in the future? Again, the same people listening to that speech had a chance to do that already. Improve education? Yeah, been there, done that. Healthcare? hahaha, how many have talked grandly about that? Have those guys in the room changed that much?
GWB scared us with terrorism, Obama is scaring us with the economy. For months it has been doom and gloom, now that the spending bill has passed, we hear the positive. Gee, think that is a coincidence?
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