It was about a year ago that we were covering the big financial services bailout plan known as “TARP,” for Troubled Asset Relief Program. See the post “Your Family’s $1,000 Bailout Bet on the Stock Market,” for example.

Here’s some news that shouldn’t surprise: The Inspector General for the TARP program calls it “unrealistic” to see much of that money paid back. Go figure.

$317 billion remains unrefunded. That’s about $3,220 per U.S. family, or $1,000 per person.

I learned a phrase early in my time in Washington that applies here: “That money was stolen fair and square.”

WashingtonWatch.com has never been profitable. Maybe someday it will be, but there aren’t enough of you yet. And also, it’s not profitable because of the downturn in the economy.

Why do I say that? Because the Washington Post is reporting that the Obama administration plans to give bailout funds to millions of small businesses.

The Obama administration is developing an initiative to take money from the $700 billion program for the banking system and make it available to millions of small businesses, which officials say are essential to any economic recovery because they employ so many people, according to sources familiar with the plan. The new effort — which would represent a striking shift from the rescue program’s original mandate — would direct billions of bailout dollars toward a program that aims more at saving jobs than righting the financial system.

This thing has “WashingtonWatch.com Support Fund” written all over it! I knew I didn’t need to be a good manager to run this thing. Just wait around for a safety net and fall back into it. That’s job creation, right there!

This won’t be the first time that the bailout, which I referred to as a “slush fund” way back in December, gets used for new things. From the get-go, it was shifted to new and different priorities.

But this one I like. Where do I get in line for my piece of the action?

(Portions of this post may have been facetious.)

The Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act, scheduled for the House floor this week, would cost the average U.S. family about $4.00.

The horse is long out of the barn, but Congress may soon step in to correct this problem with credit default swaps.

S. 961, introduced just yesterday in the Senate, would authorize the regulation of credit default swaps and other swap agreements.

Really super – now that the market for credit default swaps has collapsed in an unruly heap.

But it’s not just that Congress has been behind the gun. Congress has done affirmative harm in this area. Let’s take a look at the tape:

In 2000, Congress passed a law barring states from regulating credit default swaps under their gambling and “bucket shop” laws. This set the stage for the market in derivatives, including credit default swaps, that have been a big part of the economic meltdown. That’s what credit default swaps are – side bets that allow people to wager on financial outcomes without having to buy assets.

We gave more background and listed the Members of Congress that allowed this to happen, were still serving, and were up for election last November here.

There are two choices to make in regulation of financial services: Either leave it unregulated – buyer beware (and buyer’s will be wary – it’s not a ridiculous idea) or regulate it uniformly. You can’t leave credit default swaps – essentially a form of gambling – unregulated but still looking like a financial service. That’s a sort of fraud on the public, perpetrated by policymakers. Thanks, Congress, for coming in after the fact to mop this up.

Just in time to be too late for this week’s email newsletter, the Congressional Budget Office has come out with cost estimates for two of the bills being debated this week.

H.R. 1913, the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 comes in at about nine cents per U.S. family.

And H.R. 627, the Credit Cardholders’ Bill of Rights Act of 2009 costs about $1.35 per family. That credit card bill is undoubtedly quite low. (yuk yuk) Most of the costs from the bill are costs imposed on the private sector, and CBO estimates of private-sector costs tend to be very vague.

Here are the current votes on the two bills. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki articles about the bills.

We’re overdue here to discuss the big announcement this past week about how the government plans to sort out the “toxic assets” that have been preventing new lending and slowing down the economy.

Now, first things first: “toxic assets,” which were first referred to as “troubled assets,” will now be called “legacy assets.”

See? Things are better already. From troubled, to toxic, to legacy. Soon, perhaps, we can switch to calling them gardenias – so sweet that we kind of want to keep them around. No, that’s not true.

But this is the Troubled Assets Relief Program or “TARP” from the financial service bailout law finally being actually used for troubled assets – hurrah! (Recall that the first thing done with the TARP program was investing in financial services firms, not addressing troubled assets.) (more…)

H.J. Res. 41 proposes an amendment to the Constitution barring the President from entering into a treaty to adopt an international currency. Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner made news recently when he said something about being amenable to an international currency.

TPMMuckracker published a nice summary of the collapse of AIG on Friday. If you’re interested in Congress’ role in creating the disaster, here’s a key line: “In 2000, Congress passed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which further reduced the already weak regulation of derivatives like credit default swaps.”

Back in October, in a post called “Did Your Representative Cause the Financial Crisis?,” we featured the Senators and Members of Congress who voted to bar states from regulating credit default swaps under gambling and “bucket shop” laws.

If you’re from any of the states listed below, your Member of Congress may have helped cause the financial crisis with his or her vote. Click on your state to see which representatives helped create today’s economic problems: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, or Wyoming.

See all House votes here. The people listed are House Members who were still serving in the last Congress and who supported the Consolidated Appropriations Act with the AIG loophole, as well as Senators who were up for reelection in 2008 who allowed it to pass (plus a couple who voted for it in the House).

In early February here on this blog, I wrote favorably about the somewhat fanciful idea of televising the conference committee on the economic stimulus bill.

If conference committee meetings were televised, members of the conference committee would be constrained to explain what they were doing and why. That would be a good thing.

Well, the conference committee was not televised, members of the conference committee were not constrained to explain what they were doing, and that was a bad thing.

Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson does as good a job as any of explaining what happened to an amendment to limit bonuses from companies that receive bailout money:

Concerns on the broader compensation issue were serious enough to ensure unanimous Senate passage of an amendment to the stimulus bill sponsored by Sens. Olympia Snowe and Ron Wyden that penalized bailout bonuses in excess of $100,000. But the Snowe-Wyden amendment disappeared into the misty bog of a House-Senate conference committee, only to be trumped by language that grandfathered in AIG’s retention bonuses. At first, this seemed to be an example of immaculate legislation — miraculously fatherless. After explicitly denying responsibility, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd eventually admitted to including the exception under pressure from the administration.

So Congress and the President explicitly permitted these bonus payouts, which they knew were coming, then went berserk with recriminations against AIG and the recipients of the bonuses when they figured out what they had done. On Thursday, the House passed a bill to tax these bonuses to the tune of 90%.

There’s a word more powerful than “hypocrisy” that describes this kind of galloping idiocy. I wish I knew what it was.

All we can do about it is smile that thin smile, accepting that we’ve been robbed fair and square, again.

Or maybe we can take a lesson. . . . Something like: Haste makes waste. Specifically, when Congress acts in haste, Congress wastes. Our money.

And it’s worth noting that right now Congress is laying the groundwork for fouling up the fiscal 2010 spending process. As I wrote here ten days ago, the first two deadlines in that process have already been missed. The endgame of missing deadlines is having to do everything in haste at the last minute. And we have some idea of what happens now, right?

Want to channel your anger in a positive way? Contact your Member of Congress and ask them to get the spending process back on schedule. They won’t barely know what you mean, because half of them probably don’t even know what it is. But you can send them a link to this post if they don’t understand.

Everyone’s abuzz about the bonuses being paid out to AIG employees, some reaching above $1 million.

And Congress is there on the case, chasing down the money that . . . it is responsible for putting out there in the first place.

(Yes, yes, AIG money was a loan from the Fed, not TARP – but Congress is responsible for them all.)

So here is a bill to impose higher taxes on bonuses paid by businesses that are owned by the federal government (like AIG is now).

And, speaking of TARP, here’s a bill to impose a tax on bonuses received from companies receiving TARP funds.

Let’s not be shy with the taxing: here’s a bill to put a 90% tax on bonuses paid by business that receive TARP assistance.

In case that’s not enough, here’s another to put a 100% tax on bonuses paid by businesses that receive TARP assistance and are majority owned by the Federal Government.

Don’t worry folks. Congress is on the case! Chasing the headlines – and the fatcats that it gave all that cat food to.

Update: Here’s another bill along the same lines.