Monday Open Thread

It’s Monday and it’s open thread time again. Babble away.

More evidence our economy is improving:

The Treasury Department expects to recover all but $42 billion of the $370 billion it has lent to ailing companies since the financial crisis began last year, with the portion lent to banks actually showing a slight profit, according to a new Treasury report.

The new assessment of the $700 billion bailout program, provided by two Treasury officials on Sunday ahead of a report to Congress on Monday, is vastly improved from the Obama administration’s estimates last summer of $341 billion in potential losses from the Troubled Asset Relief Program. That figure anticipated more financial troubles requiring intervention.

[…]

Still, the new estimates would lower the administration’s deficit forecast for this fiscal year, which began in October, to about $1.3 trillion, from $1.5 trillion.

The bailout could have been done a lot better, but we’re starting to see signs that the economy is improving. Democrats will get credit for this. President Obama is expected to announce soon a $200B jobs bill using unspent money from the TARP program. I’ll certainly be glad to see that money used to help Main Street and not just Wall Street.

There’s new talk of a public option compromise. It doesn’t look much like a public option to me. Ezra Klein explains:

Currently, insurance plans are regulated by the states, which means they’re different in every state. That makes it hard for them to achieve certain efficiencies of scale or maximize their leverage against providers. But back in September, I noticed a promising provision in Max Baucus’s draft that would allow for national insurance plans, so long as they met a minimum level of federal regulation. That seemed like a potentially huge change, but I never heard another word about it, so I let it go.

The compromise being discussed is built atop that provision. The idea is that the Office of Personnel Management would choose nonprofit plans that met national standards and offer them on every state exchange (unless states opted out). These plans would be private, but the OPM would act as an aggressive purchaser, ensuring that they met high standards and conducted themselves properly. It’s a private option with a public filter, essentially. But more importantly, it’s a menu of national, nonprofit plans, which would be much more interesting from a competitive standpoint than state-based, public plans.

But the fact remains that private plans are not public options, no matter how much extra scrutiny they’re subjected to. Though the liberals in the room are listening to this compromise, sources close to the discussion tell me that the conversation is opening up beyond the insurance offerings. In other words, the compromise on the public option might end up being more than a compromised public option. This is, in my view, an extremely promising development, and I’ll say a bit more on that later today.

Open it up to anyone who wants it and we might be getting somewhere.