FINANCIAL REFORM 

What do you know about the financial reform legislation that the Democrats managed to pass last week? Do you think it lives up to the hype as "the toughest financial reform since the one we created in the aftermath of the Great Depression"? The general consensus among the politicos and columnists seems to think that it fails to protect us. Here's a roundup from the weekend ...

• "Whereas Glass-Steagall substantially altered the structure of the financial system and required the creation of brand-new kinds of firms, Dodd-Frank effectively anoints the existing banking elite. The bill makes it likely that they will be the future giants of banking as well." - Newsweek
   
• "The bottom line: this doesn't fundamentally change the way the banking industry works ... The ironic thing is that the biggest banks that took the most money end up with the most beneficial position, and the regulators that failed to stop them in first place get even more power and discretion." -- a former U.S. Treasury official
   
• "The biggest hole in the bill is the continued notion that banks and government are really one big, happy family. The banks will take risks as long as it's approved by the bureaucrats in Washington who don't understand risk-taking, and the government stands ready to help the system survive a 2008 meltdown scenario by being able to swoop in and "wind down" troubled firms that present grand "systemic risk" to the markets and the economy when they get into trouble." - The Daily Beast
   
• "The financial reform bill that's about to be passed is reform in name only. It does little to correct the problems that led to our meltdown, and may do more harm by giving people a false sense of security ... you should know the "compromise" in Dodd-Frank isn't between Republicans and Democrats, but between Democrats and Democrats. In short, it's the left's idea of how to regulate Wall Street. And while some things in the bill aren't bad, most of it is." - Investors Business Daily
   
• "For this law to be the groundbreaking remedy its architects claimed, it needed to do three things very well: protect consumers from abusive financial products, curb dangerous risk taking by institutions and cut big and interconnected financial entities down to size. So far, the report card is mixed." - New York Times

So now that Obama and the Democrats are well on their way to passing all of their legislative goals - stimulus package, healthcare, cap-and-trade, financial reform - Obama is going to use the momentum to call for ... more taxes! Obama is calling for a 0.15% tax on the liabilities of large financial institutions. Obama says that we need this tax in order to recover taxpayer money. Oddly enough, what Obama fails to realize is that businesses do not pay taxes; they collect taxes from their customers and pass them on. That .15% tax will be a tax on the people doing business with that bank. Oh .. and how long before it is increased, and how high will it go? Therefore, Obama is going to "recover" taxpayer money by raising taxes on businesses that will then pass along those increases to the consumer. Amazing how that happens and how easy it is to understand! It makes me wonder what a little logic in Washington could do for this country.