Steve Russell: Tribal governments face 'public money' challenge

We all know the argument on the left about the taxpayers paying off the bankers’ bad bets: “Too big to fail is too big to exist.” We are less familiar with the rebuttal to that argument contained in the list of top 25 transnationals. The top four are Chinese banks and the U.S. entries include some of the usual suspects: Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Bank of America. Two of those three would not exist and the third would look very different without a bailout from your tax dollars and mine.

The argument by the bailed out high stakes gamblers is to point out the number of Chinese banks at the top of the international heap and say that if we break up U.S. banks we will have no fire with which to fight the fire. It’s like Hillary Clinton’s excuse for taking Super PAC money while railing against Super PACs.

The argument that you must fight fire with fire is not entirely bogus, but it needs to be reframed with another cliché, one that pretty well describes the predicament of too many American Indian tribal governments: U.S. taxpayers are entitled to control what they fund. Public money has always come with strings.

I can make a much better argument for exempting tribal governments from the funding equals control principle than I can for exempting investment banks. The reply to the “too big to fail” banks that we need them to compete with China is disingenuous at best.