mushin no shin

Politico reports on a ‘recoupment’ provision sought by the Blue Dogs

The Blue Dogs, a group of conservative House Democrats, want Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) to include a “recoupment” provision in the Wall Street bailout package.

In a letter that will be sent to Pelosi and Boehner, the Blue Dogs, led in this case by Rep. John Tanner (D-Tenn.), are calling for a future tax to be imposed on financial services companies if taxpayers lose money on the bailout package.
[...]
Tanner and other Blue Dogs see this provision as an “insurance policy” for taxpayers, and it would amount to a 2 percent “fee” on taxable income of financial services firms.
[...]
“A recoupment clause, as we envision it, is essentially an insurance policy for the taxpayer. Three to five years after enactment of TARP, the Secretary of the Treasury shall report on the program’s net gain or loss to the taxpayer. If the plan results in the taxpayer showing a loss, then the amount of that loss would be recouped by a small fee imposed by the Internal Revenue Service on the financial services industry until the taxpayer recoups the loss. If the taxpayer comes out even or makes a profit, there would be no recoupment necessary.”

Sounds like an excellent idea to me. Now, in a philosophically pure vacuum I might prefer a higher tax on the specific institutions who received aid and none on those that did not, but I realize that in the real world that would hamper the possibility of getting it done, and really, a 2% tax even on the uninvolved companies is hardly draconian given that they will have benefited indirectly at least by the act of, you know, not letting the entire economy collapse.

The Blue Dogs are really good to have around on an issue like this, and I might even say they’re the ideal people to look to here for leadership — representatives of the conservative taxpayer who nonetheless recognize that doing nothing isn’t an option, and aren’t inflexibly bound by a rigid dogma that retards their ideas.

If only they weren’t so often god-awful on issues of war and human rights.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 28th, 2008 at 9:35 am and is filed under Babble, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.