The Wall Street Journal reported today that the TARP’s Congressional Oversight Panel, chaired by Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren, “is investigating the lending practices of institutions that received public funds, following a rash of complaints about increases in interest rates and fees.”

Reportedly, bailed-out banks like Citigroup and Bank of America are jacking up credit-card interest rates and fees on transactions. “The people who are subsidizing the activities of the banks through their tax dollars are the same people who are furnishing the high profits through consumer lending,” Warren said. “In a sense, we’re asking taxpayers to pay twice.”

While discussing the story, CNBC’s Dennis Kneale saw fit to mock Warren’s concern for taxpayers, and then tell her to stop “breathing down the necks of the banks” and “let these guys do what they need to do”:

My real problem is with Elizabeth Warren…She has been crusading against credit card companies for years. She thinks they’re evil…Don’t we already know that credit card companies charge you a ridiculous amount of money? I didn’t need contract legalese to tell me that. I already know that [...] This oversight committee breathing down the necks of the banks…Government ought to get out of the banking business and let these guys do what they need to do to raise the money they need to raise.

Watch it:

Of course, Warren’s panel is tasked with overseeing the TARP, and verifying that taxpayers don’t get gamed by the very banks that they are bailing out. CNBC, meanwhile, has made a habit of defending oil speculators, outlandish bonuses for bailed-out Wall St. executives, and huge tax giveaways for the rich, so it’s not surprising that they’re siding with the banks on this one.

On another level, this whole episode is symbolic of the trouble with effectively nationalizing the banks without taking the requisite control. Now, the government is awkwardly positioned between an action that is good for the banks, but bad for taxpayers. As Aaron Task at Tech Ticker wrote:

This fee-issue speaks to the folly of having banks that are quasi-nationalized vs. either fully private or totally under government control.…[T]hey should be dealt with as insolvent banks have been for generations — put into FDIC receivership — rather than continuing this charade that certain banks haven’t already been nationalized.

How many headaches — from bonuses to hiked up interest rates — could have been avoided if the government had just exercised some control over the banks that it effectively owns?

Both CQ and National Journal have write-ups of the “tax battle” evidently looming between big business and the Obama administration, over the administration’s proposal to begin taxing the profits companies earn overseas. Of course, the business lobby is casting the proposal as a business-killing apocalypse:

“Just imagine a world 10 years from now where there are no U.S. multinationals because they’ve all been bought by foreign competitors,” says tax lobbyist Kenneth Kies. “This is bigger than ‘card check,’ bigger than cap-and-trade, and people don’t realize it.”

“Everything else pales in comparison,” says National Foreign Trade Council President William Reinsch, whose group is partnering with the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Manufacturers to preserve the deferral rule.

The business lobby’s rhetoric is similar to that used by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), who warned that “companies are going to leave” because of Obama’s “stupid, dumb-ass” tax proposals. But their scaremongering ignores the fact that U.S. corporate tax revenue as a share of the economy is below the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average.

The U.S. raises less revenue from corporations than countries like the United Kingdom and Ireland, even with a technically higher rate. As we’ve noted before, loopholes and shelters contribute to a skewed idea of what the U.S. corporate tax system really looks like, but suffice to say, it’s not the crippling system that businesses make it out to be.

Plus, according to research by Dhammika Dharmapala at the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation, allowing corporations to defer taxation on offshore profits means they will leave that money offshore regardless of their home nation’s tax rate:

Delaying repatriations in this way can confer a substantial deferral advantage on the [Multi National Corporations] by reducing the present value of its US tax liability. Moreover, this deferral advantage is magnified for tax haven affiliates (because the immediate source-based tax paid to the tax haven government is low or zero). Thus, MNCs have incentives to use tax havens to reduce or defer their tax liabilities, regardless of whether they happen to be based in countries with territorial or worldwide tax systems.

This deferral actually encourages corporations to invest overseas, costing America jobs and lost revenue. And in 2004, when the U.S. opened “a one-year window in which companies could bring their profits home at a 5.25 percent tax rate,” most of the money “was used to buy back stock from shareholders, not to invest in domestic operations.” Incidentally, for every $1 that corporations spent lobbying for that tax holiday, they saved $220 in taxes.