The New State of the Union

clipped from dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com President Obama plans to call on Thursday for taxing about 50 big banks and major financial institutions for at least the next decade to recoup all taxpayer losses from the Wall Street bailout fund. While the banks maintain that taxpayers made money from the bailout to save them (many have repaid their federal funds with interest and the government also has made money in selling the banks’ warrants that it held as collateral), losses to the bailout fund are expected from money paid to rescue the automakers Chrysler and General Motors and the insurance giant American International Group, and from a program to help troubled homeowners avert foreclosures. The administration official said that the auto manufacturers and A.I.G., as well as the housing finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both of which now are under government conservatorships, are not in a financial position to be taxed to recover taxpayers’ losses. The administration is calling the tax a “financial crisis responsibility fee,”

Taxing those who paid their loans back early and at a profit to the American people to pay for failures who are explicitly excluded from the tax and calling it a "responsibility fee" is perverted irony that passes for logic in the current Administration.
I'm not saying the banks didn't have a hand in the crisis because that's just as absurd as saying that they were more responsible than Washington lawmakers gagged by lobbying bribes and regulators who should be charged with criminal negligence. Let's not forget the American people, so quick to let their fingers be pointed for them at an easily vilified target. Groupthink on this scale hasn't been seen in 70 years. Nobody wants to blame themselves when it's so much easier to demand reparations from the rich with your head held high. After all, in our culture that honors victims before heroes being impoverished connotes a certain moral superiority - which makes it all the easier to remind the wealthy of their noblesse oblige.