TARP, ARRP and HARP

We Floridians are all too familiar with “tarp”, especially during summer months when hurricane force winds rip off shingles from rooftops and large sheets of the bright blue canvas are tacked over leaks to protect the inside of the home from additional damages. It takes weeks, even months, for an insurance company to assess the extent and dollar value of a loss.

Tarp is a makeshift remedy with no guarantee that there won’t still be scars on a structure, such as mold or mud-flooding, that aren’t covered by that hefty insurance premium. To make matters worse, if you’re like most people, your savings are pretty much nonexistent and your credit cards are maxed out and you don’t qualify for additional short-term loans. Tarp isn’t the answer to your troubles.

TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program) has proven to be pretty much the same. The initial disbursement of the $700B government investment of taxpayer dollars was virtually wasted with the cash infusion to banks. The banking industry was given a blanket policy whereby their misdealing was covered by shoddy government workmanship.

The remaining $350B from TARP is being held in escrow with the Obama Administration in a quandary as to how to safely disburse the money without being snookered again by financial institutions. Instead of sparking up loans, banks want to be left alone to fan a smoke screen that will leave the economy smoldering for years and no assurance that in the end there won’t eventually be a raging firestorm of depressing proportions. This isn’t meant to discredit President Obama; it’s just a plain and simple belief that no one really knows what to do. It’s all guesswork.

Now we’re looking head-on at another program, ARRP (American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan), which is too much of a sound-alike to TARP. It’s not a bad omen though, with over $800B of funds to assist in resolving the somersaults of the worsening recession. Its effect on the economic meltdown isn’t likely to be enough to make an immediate difference to corporate or individual financial shortfalls.

For eight years, Democrats too easily played patsy to Bush politics. They had no backbone from the very start of the war in Iraq, doing their part to make billions of dollars available to keep the military ball rolling on foreign oil. Eventually, they tried to backtrack and admit it was a mistake but the alternative at the time was to confront a Republican-controlled Congress and be accused of being unpatriotic, even traitors.

To the very end, Democrats pledged taxpayer money by failing to properly earmark the initial $350B of TARP.

By the end of the Bush reign of errors, most Americans conceded Iraq was poorly planned and much too expensive. Heck, last year the Iraqi government had a surplus of $79B of what can be called as an American taxpayer relief fund. Iraq got a pretty darn good return on American monetary “investments” that cost us anywhere from $600B (Pentagon), $1T to $2T (Congressional Budget Office) or $3T (Joseph Stiglitz, Columbia University Professor, 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, and 2007 Nobel Peace Prize). It’s kinda like what happened on the home front - trillions of dollars were lost to Wall Street.

The blame game is fairly pointless, although George “The Scourge” Bush is the primary culprit with his commandant-in-chief attitude, convincing every American that they too can become a homeowner. The resultant excesses of lackey lending institutions helped create the 10-digit budget deficit, a dollar figure that makes no sense.

And yet, Republicans in general are proving themselves to be afflicted with same-minded ideas with a rehash of the monetary policies of the past eight years. When the House passed the $819B stimulus package, Republicans in unison barked up the wrong money tree with their insistence that tax cuts and reduced spending would be an appropriate action to stimulate the economy. It was probably a token stance of solidarity – Senate Republicans will likely give passage to ARRP.

The National Republican Party is way out there in right field, no pitcher, no catcher, just a shortstop with Democrats hitting one left field hit after another. And yet, red and blue states alike are already making plans to spend their share of relief funds. Just how many friends (voters) do Republicans think they’ll make with such game plans?

Which leads me to suggest that any recovery package that Republicans might drum up would be labeled HARP (Hapless Anemic Republican Program). Let’s lay that idea to rest and canvas such a leaky premise with an oversized blanket of tarp.