Be sure to check out John Berlau’s piece on how President Obama brought his bank tax plan into the Massachussets election yesterday. The president is operating a classic bait-and-switch:

“We want our money back,” Obama proclaimed Thursday, referring to the projected $117 billion shortfall in the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). But the irony is that the tax would mostly hit the firms that have already paid the government back, while exempting the firms that still owe the government billions upon billions: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Motors, and Chrysler.
Boston superbank and money manager State Street Corp. — one of the Bay State’s ten largest private employers — will definitely be hit by the tax, even though it was one of the first banks to pay back the TARP money this summer and never asked for it in the first place. State Street was one of nine banks to be summoned in the fall of 2008 by Bush administration Treasury secretary Henry Paulson and given an offer they “couldn’t refuse” (as various published accounts have documented, Paulson did not give the bankers a real choice) of an infusion of funds in return for the government’s taking ownership of a sizable chuck of the companies. The Boston Globe cited both the firm’s CEO and an independent banking analyst as saying that “State Street was not in any need of the government infusion of capital.” It had limited subprime exposure, and although its profits did fall, it never had an unprofitable quarter during the crisis. It is not exactly one of the firms that “helped lead us into the mess we’re in.”. . .
But in Massachusetts and elsewhere, the Obama tax doesn’t stop with State Street or even with bailed out banks. As the Associated Press reported, the Obama tax would also “include many institutions that accepted no money from the $700 billion financial industry bailout.” In fact, the institution doesn’t even have to be a bank to be assessed this “crisis responsibility fee.”. . .
Then there are the Massachusetts-based insurance-holding companies Liberty Mutual Group and MassMutual Financial Group, which employ thousands in the state. These firms also did not take a dime of TARP money, but they would likely be subject to the tax because their assets far exceed the $50 billion threshold. The White House fact sheet does say that “the base for the fee would be appropriately reduced based on insurance policy reserves” for policies subject to state guarantee funds in the event of failure. But the fee would still be a significant cost for insurers and policyholders who had nothing to do with the financial-sector implosion.
“Virtually every examination of what caused the financial meltdown in 2008 has shown that property/casualty insurance played little or no significant role in the crisis,” the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies said in a statement. “By asking insurers to pay this fee, President Obama is asking those who acted responsibly to pay for the Wall Street firms that gambled with their customers’ money and lost.”

The president complains that Scott Brown has “parked his truck on Wall Street,” but the president is slapping parking tickets on legally-parked cars on Main Streets all over Massachussets and the nation at large.