Confirmed: Tax Hack Timothy Geithner is Your New Treasury Secretary

Interesting, isn't it, the argument Senate Republicans have been using to complain about Timothy Geithner? After eight years of the Bush administration cheating on the Constitution, now all of a sudden it's morally wrong to let someone lead a federal agency if he cheated on its rules, or maybe misunderstood them in a drunken haze.

Anyway, accounting failures notwithstanding, last night Timothy Geithner was confirmed as Treasury Secretary in a 60-34 vote. Today is his first day of work, so let's give him a warm welcome as he sharpens his pencils and prepares to disburse billions of dollars to struggling banks and homeowners (mostly banks).

Remember, there's a whopping $350 billion left in that troubled asset relief program…

Part of the remaining $350 billion may be used to purchase troubled assets from bank balance sheets and place them in what Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. chief Sheila Bair has dubbed an "aggregator bank."

And while taxpayers will surely recover some of that sum eventually, more money is likely to be needed in order for the bank rescue to work.

"The amount of working capital you'd expect the government to take into this would be around $3 trillion to $4 trillion," said Simon Johnson, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and author of its Baseline Scenario financial crisis blog.

Well, that's reassuring.

If we're talking about $4 trillion, it really won't matter if Geithner's totals are off by $34,000 or so.