Obama: "I Haven't Crapped On the Economy Enough"

Genius! Why browbeat banks to lend when I can just take the money?

UPDATE: Sir Lawrence agrees. This will have to go to the courts. If I am Jamie Dimon or John Stumpf, I sue and say "We didn't need the money, we didn't want the money, we gave it back the minute that we were allowed to, and it cost us hundreds of million of dollars, all because the government didn't want to taint the actually crappy banks."

UPPDATE: Obama is going to announce his intention to impose this giant fee on the banking system. More shocking than the stupidity of the policy is the stupidity of a statement like the one from Doug Elliott of the Brookings Institution in this Bloomberg article: “The politics on this is really quite easy,” said Doug Elliott, a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and a former managing director at JPMorgan Chase & Co. “The public would be supportive of anything up to shooting and burning the bankers.” Well, Mr. Elliott, our leaders are not supposed to just follow the easy political stratagem, they are actually supposed to advance policies that are in our interests, and a healthy economy is most certainly in our interest. Leadership is not characterized by submitting to the mob's amorphous emotional desire to seek retribution, but to make sound economic decisions for the good of the country despite the prevalence that desire. That is basic leadership, and it was in fact the type of leadership that we were fraudulently sold in the person of presidential candidate Barack Obama. This administration has its boot on throat of those who take risk, drive the economy an employ Americans at productive work. Taxing the banks in the manner that Obama proposes is to press that boot down more firmly on the neck of our entire economic system. That is the truth and if you don't like it, then you don't like our world-beating standards of living - you don't like all the comforts we have, the relative safety we live in, the unprecedented health we experience and all the other things about how we live today that were unimaginable to those that came before us. Average Americans should accept that bankers, while unsympathetic perhaps, are critical to our economic system and that the system works well over time to deliver a way of life that is, in total, a great thing, and suppress their putative rage. Our leaders, however, must be above average; anyone in leadership should have deduced and internalized this from the start. That Obama hasn't leads to one of only two conclusions, he is profoundly ignorant of the way our economy works or he is purposefully trying to destroy it.