The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has released its latest estimate of the final cost to taxpayers of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) that Congress passed two years ago during the financial meltdown. At the time the eventual cost was estimated to be as much as $700 billion, a very large amount of money even to the government, but was thought necessary to prevent an even larger global financial catastrophe. The estimate has dropped steadily, especially this year, and the CBO has issued a new estimate of $25 billion. Here are a news story and the CBO report itself.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/la-naw-tarp-cost-20101130,0,495450.story

CBO's latest assessment of the widely reviled program is lower even than the Obama administration's own estimate of less than $50 billion, which was criticized as too rosy after it was issued at the end of September.

"Clearly, it was not apparent when the TARP was created two years ago that the cost would turn out to be this low," CBO said in its report.

http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=11980

The irony is that one of the things the very angry American voters of 2010 were most angry about was the TARP program. I would venture to guess a great number of them still have a cost of hundreds of billions branded in their brains. A bailout, a giveaway, an albatross around our children's necks. As the Reuters article says, a number of ousted Congressmen can point to their votes in favor of TARP as one of the reasons. And yet the program has been vindicated.

There are two things I like about this. One, which I liked at the time, is that those who designed and stood up for the program did it because they thought it was the right thing to do. It was a bold response in extraordinary times. From books that have already been written we know they knew it was not going to be popular. Second, it was a bipartisan effort. Both Republicans and Democrats stood up for it, the primary architect being Henry Paulson, the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury and a Republican. The Bush Administration was still in office. Barack Obama was involved in the discussions, and was in favor of TARP, but he was not President yet and would not even be elected until the next month. It was bipartisanship in the best sense of the word. Now why can't we have a little more of that? With unemployment still high, with people still losing their homes, with what is going on in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, with what is going on in Iran and North Korea, aren't there real problems that can be addressed instead of just going to war with the other party?

Yeah, I know, I'm a utopian <g>.