McArdle says "Fix the banks!"

The Atlantic's Megan McArdle weighs in on the stimulus package:

Having defended Obama's candidacy largely on his economic team, I'm having serious buyer's remorse. Geithner, who is rapidly starting to look like the weakest link, is rattling around by himself in Treasury. Meanwhile, the administration has clearly prioritized a stimulus package that will not work without fixing the banks over, um, fixing the banking system. Unlike most fiscal conservatives, I'm not mad at him for trying to increase the size of the government; that's, after all, what he got elected promising to do. But he also promised to be non-partisan and accountable, and the size and composition stimulus package looks like just one more attempt to ram through his ideological agenda without much scrutiny, with the heaviest focus on programs that will be especially hard to cut.

Much of the justification for the $800 billion TARP was that our national economy hinges on the ability and willingness of banks to lend. Paralyzed banks = paralyzed economy. Fair enough. So why do we still have no idea how this money is being spent and which toxic assets from which banks are being (or will be) internalized? Shouldn't this project override the spending bill in terms of importance? More from McArdle:

Given that the standard model of the Great Depression has the FDIC and the fixes to the banking system playing a vastly more important role than any FDR spending program, I'd say that the liberal econobloggers bear the burden of proof that fixing the banks is NOT vastly more important than whizzing through green energy spending at the lowest possible level of scrutiny.