What do you say to all our friends who feel that TARP was a success, citing that the majority of the loaned money has been paid back (and, possibly, a 10% return on our loans, which will presumably be offset by the outstanding billions)? You could try some of these, most of which involve the lack of lessons learned (thanks in part to the Fed discount window and getting to lie about using it) and the consolidation of the banking industry, which has changed very little about how it operates:

• "The political 'success' of TARP is an economic disaster for everyone except its immediate beneficiaries."

You know what obscures facts sometimes? Opinion-free, neutral language. True! Here is the soothing language from yesterday's Times: "Nearly a year after the federal rescue of the nation's biggest banks, taxpayers have begun seeing profits from the hundreds of billions of dollars in aid that many critics thought might never be seen again…. These early returns are by no means a full accounting of the huge financial rescue undertaken by the federal government last year to stabilize teetering banks and other companies…. But the mere hint of bailout profits for the nearly year-old Troubled Asset Relief Program has been received as a welcome surprise." So, wait, what are they saying? [...]

Now there is a Tarp-o-Meter. "So far, only a handful of smaller banks that received TARP money have paid back their debts, totaling a meager $353 million, about .0005 percent of the $700 billion allocated for the bad-asset-gobbling government program."

Taking about 8,400 words to arrive at a puzzled shrug, Steve Brill conducts patient readers of this week's New York Times Sunday magazine through the elaborate reckonings of executive pay that have convulsed the seven firms benefiting from the federal Troubled Asset Relief Program. Brill, the former publisher of American Lawyer and able chronicler of the Washington bureaucracy's response to Sept. 11, homes in on the agons of Kenneth Feinberg, the former 9/11 compensation master now tasked by the Treasury Department with the thankless work of serving as TARP's "compensation czar."

Via Jason Linkins, who found it on Consumerist, here's a great explanation of where the toxic assets TARP was designed to relieve are. Or maybe I'm just really hungry right now.

There is only $135 billion left unspent in the original bailout pool of $700 billion.

"Seven hundred billion was a number out of the air," [Neel] Kashkari recalls, wheeling toward the hex nuts and the bolts. "It was a political calculus. I said, 'We don't know how much is enough. We need as much as we can get [from Congress]. What about a trillion?' 'No way,' Hank [Paulson] shook his head. I said, 'Okay, what about 700 billion?' We didn't know if it would work. We had to project confidence, hold up the world. We couldn't admit how scared we were, or how uncertain." Well. Ain't that grand.

Oooh, so the head of the Consumer Electronics Association has revealed himself to be a very confused man. Because of the TARP that is hanging over us, and because the President is drowning us in debt (um, unlike the Bush administration!), he claims: "The next generation won't have a Bill Gates, a Steve Jobs or a Mark Zuckerberg because the budding American entrepreneur won't be able to secure the financing to create the next dynamic technology company that would have energized the economy." Oh no, a generation without a Mark Zuckerberg! In the end, very little of this makes any sense.