Obama proposes bank taxes, reforms

A couple of thoughts on the proposals this week. Let’s start with this proposed “bank tax”. Given the outrage centered around bank bonuses, the tax is supposed to penalize the banks for requiring government help last year (in the form of TARP). The idea is that the banks benefited from TARP and TARP will probably lose money on some portion of its loans, therefore we’ll tax all banks to make up any shortfall to the return of taxpayer funds.