The Senate is considering a bill that would make bailouts more likely

(Image credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

published 6 March 2018

Do you like it when our government uses enormous sums of tax dollars to bail out "too big to fail" financial institutions whose incompetent or shady business practices have gotten them into a heap of trouble? If so, the Senate has the bill for you!

So concludes a new analysis from the Congressional Budget Office about legislation that goes to an initial vote in the Senate on Tuesday. Among other measures, the bill would exempt around two dozen banks valued between $50 billion and $250 billion from regulation by the Federal Reserve to which other financial companies are subject, a change the CBO says would make bailouts more likely.

"CBO's estimate of the bill's budgetary effect is subject to considerable uncertainty, in part because it depends on the probability in any year that a systematically important financial institution will fail," the CBO reported. "CBO estimates that the probability is small under current law and would be slightly greater under the legislation.” While the very largest banks, like Goldman Sachs, a past bailout recipient, have assets above $250 billion, the category does include other major banking institutions, including previous bailout subjects like SunTrust.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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