Reading H.R. 4173

And Barney Frank is giving it all away... From David Reilly at Bloomberg:

Bankers Get $4 Trillion Gift From Barney Frank
To close out 2009, I decided to do something I bet no member of Congress has done -- actually read from cover to cover one of the pieces of sweeping legislation bouncing around Capitol Hill.

Hunkering down by the fire, I snuggled up with H.R. 4173, the financial-reform legislation passed earlier this month by the House of Representatives. The Senate has yet to pass its own reform plan. The baby of Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, the House bill is meant to address everything from too-big-to-fail banks to asleep-at-the-switch credit-ratings companies to the protection of consumers from greedy lenders.

I quickly discovered why members of Congress rarely read legislation like this. At 1,279 pages, the �Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act� is a real slog. And yes, I plowed through all those pages. (Memo to Chairman Frank: �ystem� at line 14, page 258 is missing the first �s�.)

The reading was especially painful since this reform sausage is stuffed with more gristle than meat. At least, that is, if you are a taxpayer hoping the bailout train is coming to a halt.

If you�re a banker, the bill is tastier. While banks opposed the legislation, they should cheer for its passage by the full Congress in the New Year: There are huge giveaways insuring the government will again rescue banks and Wall Street if the need arises.

A couple of the more egregious line items (and there are lots of them):

Since Congress isn�t cutting jobs, why not add a few more. The bill calls for more than a dozen agencies to create a position called �Director of Minority and Women Inclusion.� People in these new posts will be presidential appointees. I thought too-big-to-fail banks were the pressing issue. Turns out it�s diversity, and patronage.

Acorn gets back into play with this one.

Don�t worry, this time regulators will have better tools. Six months after being created, the council will report to Congress on �whether setting up an electronic database� would be a help. Maybe they�ll even get to use that Internet thingy.

This is the same government failure to innovate that we have with Homeland Security. They cannot search a list of 500,000 names efficiently but I can go online to Amazon, use my credit card and it takes just a few minutes to verify it and to make a purchase and there are how many hundreds of million credit cards out there worldwide?

Instead, it supports the biggest banks. It authorizes Federal Reserve banks to provide as much as $4 trillion in emergency funding the next time Wall Street crashes. So much for �no-more-bailouts� talk. That is more than twice what the Fed pumped into markets this time around. The size of the fund makes the bribes in the Senate�s health-care bill look minuscule.

As Margaret Thatcher said: "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money."