A former Daschle aide reassures us, “He’s the gold standard for integrity in government.” (Precisely the problem, isn’t it?)

-Michael Cannon

Today’s front page of the Wall Street Journal features an article [$] on the failure of banks to increase their lending, as Congress had hoped that they would when the funds were allocated. The highlight, though, a choice quote from zee Germans:

On Sunday, Franz Müntefering, chairman of Germany’s Social Democrats, said in an interview with a German newspaper that “most of the bankers are competent and responsible, but there are also some beatniks, pyromaniacs and gangsters.”

But back to the point of the article: none of the banks that received the TARP funding — funding operating under the provision that, “Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.” — are not being properly allocated. Now, politicians have resorted to their natural talent of complaining, in this case that the banks that got these non-reviewable funds are not spending in the way that they wanted it to be spent.

To paraphrase Walter Sobchak (and to turn him on his head), this is what happens when you bend over for an industry. The money’s gone, and is not coming back. You got had, son.

Via the New York Times Economix blog, a graph of the proposed stimulus package, currently in the House:

The “???” is explained as follows:

The summary’s introduction says the bill will contain “$275 billion in economic recovery tax cuts and $550 billion in thoughtful and carefully targeted priority investments with unprecedented accountability measures built in.” But those accountability measures seem to have a giant loophole; in the “executive summary” of spending measures that immediately follows this grandiose statement, the various spending programs total only $518.7 billion. So they’re, you know, just $31.3 billion short. (To be fair, there’s a much, much longer list that follows that I have not yet had a chance to tally up, but I will hunt for the missing $31.3 billion there.)

In any case, I took the liberty of plugging all those figures into Excel to give you a sense of how the package is distributed. The category names are all taken from the report, with the exception of “???,” which I used to refer to the $31.3 billion unaccounted for in the executive summary.

Kosmopolitan contributor Connor Mendenhall, however, knows exactly where “???” is going:

Those military Keynesian multipliers, they’re hard to pass up