[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 27 (Tuesday, February 10, 2009)]
[House]
[Page H1084]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          THE FAILURES OF TARP

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. I have concerns about the new plan by Treasury Secretary 
Geithner. Now, he is not explicitly asking the Congress for more TARP 
money. In fact, the Senate already gave him $350 billion more of TARP 
money, but they are tapping the Federal Reserve, in addition to that 
$350 billion, for hundreds of billions of dollars for his new plan.
  As the New York Times says, ``For all of its boldness, the plan 
largely repeats the Bush administration's approach of deferring to many 
of the same companies and executives who peddled risky loans and 
investments at the heart of the crisis.'' That's right. The people who 
have gotten us into this and who have enriched themselves are the 
people who are going to protect the taxpayers and who are going to get 
us out of this. I don't believe that.
  Some of the most glaring deficiencies of his plan are the so-called 
restraints on the obscene executive compensations. They are a pale 
shadow of what they could be. There was one good provision in TARP that 
almost everybody missed. It said that, if Congress passes a law, all of 
the past TARP agreements--all of them--will have to be brought in 
compliance of that law. We could get back the money they paid out in 
bonuses if we pass a law to do that. I would suggest Mr. Geithner 
should ask, but if he will not ask, we should still pass the law and 
begin to make taxpayers whole.
  Beyond that, instead of tapping the taxpayers and borrowing money, 
the other tremendous failure is to put in place a mechanism to pay for 
this in the names of the American taxpayers in this generation and in 
the two generations to come.
  A modest imposition of a transfer tax--something we had from 1917, it 
was doubled during the Great Depression and only expired in the 
sixties--a transfer tax of up to one-quarter of 1 percent, something 
the British have on the London Exchange, would raise about $150 billion 
a year.
  Wall Street--those scions of ``lift yourselves up by the bootstraps; 
we are capitalist types''--could pay for their own bailout. Now, there 
are a couple of things wrong with the proposal. One is it would hurt 
some speculators. Of course, people seem to think there is some value 
in speculators because some of them trade on one-tenth of 1 percent or 
less margin 100 or 1,000 times a day. It wouldn't hurt people whose 
401(k)s have already been decimated. In fact, it would stabilize the 
markets, and it wouldn't put the taxpayers on the hook. It would be 
Wall Street on the hook. Now, I don't know what is wrong with that. I 
don't think Main Street America thinks there is anything wrong with 
that, but somehow, downtown at the Treasury, Mr. Geithner and, 
obviously, Wall Street think that's wrong.
  So let's protect the taxpayers. Let's raise the money from Wall 
Street, itself, and let's put in meaningful and punitive restrictions 
on executive compensation, and if they want to go work somewhere else, 
good luck to them. Mr. Geithner said, ``Oh, they'll all go work for 
foreign banks.'' Good. Maybe they'll ruin the foreign banks, too, and 
that will give us a competitive advantage in the future when we grow 
our small- and medium-sized banks that didn't gamble like these jerks 
on Wall Street.

                          ____________________