Just announced on CNN just now that the Obama adminstration is going to announce tomorrow during Obama's speech on jobs creation that he is going to ask Congress to use $200 billion from TARP for a jobs bill!
This is great news!
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com...
President Obama will propose using $200 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to support creating jobs, White House officials confirmed Monday.
The president, in an economic speech before the Brookings Institution on Tuesday, will argue that the money would be well spent by funding projects to build bridges and roads, weatherize homes, and provide other assistance for small businesses as well as the unemployed.
Congress in October 2008 authorized President George W. Bush's plan for $700 billion for TARP to bail out the nation's largest banks and financial institutions. But the banks have been repaying their loans faster than
expected, so the government finds itself with untapped TARP money that it potentially could use for other domestic programs.
As we all know there is a tension in the White House's economic team on jobs creation vs deficit reduction. In the previous few weeks Geithner was considering using the repaid TARP money to pay down the deficit.
However, there has been a HUGE push back from the Congress that that TARP funds should be used for MAIN STREET.
In the last few days it appears that the White House has been listening to Congress and Main street.
According to CNN Obama is going announce in his big speech that he will push Congress to use $200 billion from TARP for job creation. It will be broken down to infrastructure jobs, small business loans, etc. The details will be in the speech.
Before this announcement, top Democrats have been urging the White House to do this very thing.
http://thehill.com/...
A senior Democrat said Congress is more likely to pass a job creation bill this year if President Barack Obama endorses using bailout money to pay for it.
Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), assistant to the Speaker and chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in an interview with The Hill on Friday that the House is "poised" to pass a jobs bill, but Obama's backing is needed to get it through the Senate and shore up support in the House.
Well apparently Obama is going to do just that.
Geithner himself is on board as well. In an interview on Political Captial with Al Hunt, Geithner was asked about TARP funds being used for jobs creation and he said yes.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
HUNT: Let me ask one more. The White House did say today that Gibbs - Robert Gibbs said that you wanted to use some TARP funds for specific job creation. How much money and how many jobs are you talking about?
GEITHNER: We're going to lay out in some more detail in the next couple days a range of important things about the TARP. We're going to explain that we're going to have substantial savings, that we're going to have very substantial resources we can make available to support not just the immediate priorities the country faces in spurring investment in job creation, but also to meet our long term fiscal -
HUNT: Right.
GEITHNER: - challenges. Those resources are going to be very, very substantial because we have been very successful in helping to stabilize the financial system, bring the cost of credit down, open up these markets at much, much lower cost than anybody anticipated.