Stop whining about TARP – it makes a tidy profit

The Treasury Department issued a bland press release on Wednesday announcing that two more banks have repurchased their TARP investments, or recalibrated their financial instruments, or some other such financial mumbo-jumbo, thus returning to taxpayers the money provided them during the recent bank meltdown.

The two banks, neither of which you've ever heard of, are Bank of Kentucky Financial Corporation and First Midwest Bancorp, Inc. But that's not important. What we find interesting is the rest of the statement, which states as follows:

In March 2011, Treasury announced that TARP’s bank programs turned a profit. Since that time, further repayments and income through TARP’s bank programs, such as the payment announced today, provide additional positive returns for taxpayers.

With today’s proceeds, taxpayers have now recovered more than $258 billion from TARP’s bank programs through repayments, dividends, interest, and other income. That exceeds the original financial support Treasury made through those programs ($245 billion) by approximately $13 billion.

In other words, taxpayers have thus far made a profit of $13 billion on the TARP program. That's... hmmm... well, if we assume there are about 100 million taxpayers in America (various sources during our 30 seconds of Internet research put the total number of tax returns filed in some recent year to 140 million, with about 99 million of those actually paying some form of taxes), that would equate to 13,000,000,000 / 100,000,000, or $130 per taxpayer of crisp cold cash in profit on the program.

So to those who continue to bitch and moan about the TARP program, which in addition to running a nice profit helped save the US and likely much of the Western world from financial Armageddon during and following the catastrophe of the George W. Bush economy, please explain why you hate making money. Isn't that what capitalism is all about?