Wachovia Skimming A Fee From Haiti Donations

Call it greed, or call it foresight. Whatever you want to call it, the fee Barack Obama wants to level against banks ends up being a defacto tax on America. But of course he knew this. People off the street knew it would happen, so to suggest that the economic masterminds in the Obama regime had no clue this was happening is disingenuous.

When Barack obama proposed extracting a fee out of the ass of major banks as payback for bailing them out, anyone with an I.Q. in double digits could have predicted what would have happened. Fees by banks have been going up for months now, partly behind the shield of recovery and partly as a cushion against what might come from the White House at payback time. Well, here it comes, and just as I said, the customers are the ones ultimately paying this fee. Rising credit card rates, ATM fees, bounced check penalties and the like have all been rising, and all that helped major banks turn a profit this quarter.

Well, it all worked out in the end then, didn’t it? Banks recovered (except for the few hundred that Obama let drown), and these fee hikes will most likely be temporary (after all, they do want to keep customers), so where’s the problem? It’s hard times for everybody. The problem is, that if you hit scumbags like the banks with a fee, they’ll just roll those over to the customer. What are you going to do? Find another bank? Obama has eliminated most of the competition by bankrolling some, and allowing others to wither away. Those would be your local banks. The big boys not only survived, but they prospered. Now Obama wants some of that prosperity, and banks being for profit entities that they are have found a way give Ceasar his due.

But in this whole mess, the law of unintended consequences reared its ugly head. Wachovia, who Wells Fargo got for a song, is charging a 3% international service fee to those that are donating to Haitian relief. Yes, if you want to help the people of Haiti and are using Wachovia, they will be skimming 3% off the top. So in the end, not only are Americans paying this fee that Obama is pretending to impose on the banks, but now the the folks that are the most destitute, the most in need are having aid to them chipped away. Wachovia will justify it as a cost of doing business. Obama is justifying his fee as a way to make banks pay for the privilege of surviving. Both are unethical, and both extract a piece of the now shrunken American pie.

Barry, the next time you come up with a great idea like this, consult me first. I’ll lay out the pitfalls to you, and allow you to make an intelligent decision. Then again, maybe this is the plan. A tax is a tax, no matter how you try and launder the money.