Yesterday, the Treasury Department announced that it’s allowing ten banks to repay $68 billion in TARP money. McClatchy added today that the federal government actually saw a profit on this $68 billion, albeit a small one:

In addition to returning the $68 billion, the 10 banks paid the government $1.8 billion in dividends on the preferred shares of stock the government owned. That translates to an annualized rate of return of about 4.64 percent on the $68 billion. In all, the government has received $4.5 billion from all bailout recipients, who’ve received $200 billion, for an annualized rate of return since Nov. 12, 2008, when the money was lent out, of 3.94 percent.

As Matthew Yglesias pointed out, this seems to show that “for all the complaining from both the right and the populist left about spending $700 billion on bailouts, the net fiscal cost of the $700 billion TARP program is likely to be dramatically lower.” However, CNBC’s crack economic team isn’t buying it, and spent a segment today discussing how the Treasury is clearly going to put the repaid TARP funds into a government slush fund to bail out “the Boston Globe” and “the guys that make Chia pets,” and thus taxpayers will never see the money again. Watch it:

CNBC contributor Steve Leisman provided a nice moment of sanity during the segment, reminding his co-contributor Stephen Moore that “you were the one arguing that the taxpayers would never see a dime from this, the banks would never pay it back, and now you want us to believe your next new warning?”

There are real questions about where the money repaid from TARP should go, and one of the options is having Treasury hold onto it in case of another economic free fall. This is what Herb Allison, who the Obama administration has tapped to run the program, thinks we should do. Other options include paying down debt or using the funds to aid smaller, community banks.

There is also some ambiguity about Treasury’s plan for winding down its interest in institutions like Citigroup and GMAC, from which there will likely be no repayment anytime soon. But CNBC couldn’t be bothered with a serious discussion, and decided that it would be more entertaining to laugh about the federal government buying Chia pets.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former policy director for Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign, recently told Congressional Quarterly that conservatives needed a “‘Center for American Progress’ for the right.” His most recent research doesn’t bode well for his think-tank ambitions.

Holtz-Eakin has published a paper claiming that eliminating the estate tax would create 1.5 million jobs. He concluded:

“Eliminating the estate tax would raise the probability of hiring by 8.6 percent, increase payrolls by 2.6 percent and expand investment by 3 percent…If small business payrolls were to rise by as much as 2.6 percent strictly through additional hiring, this translates to roughly 1.5 million additional small business jobs.“

This conclusion is very, very unlikely, relies on sensitive assumptions, leaps of logic, and dubious calculations. Here’s where the study goes wrong:

It severely overestimates the incidence of the estate tax on small businesses: Holtz-Eakin asserts that eliminating the estate tax would raise the wealth reported on estates by over $1.6 trillion. He describes this as an “increase in small business capital,” despite the fact that only 1.3 percent of the .24 percent of all estates who pay estate taxes are small businesses. In 2009, according to the Center on Budget and Policy priorities, only 80 (yes, eight-zero) businesses or farms nationwide will owe any estate tax at all. The average rate the heirs to these estates will pay will be 14% of their multi-million dollar inheritances. Read more

Today, the Chamber of Commerce launched a $100 million campaign to “defend the free-market system,” with an accompanying piece in Politico that, as Josh Marshall noted, reads like a Chamber press release. Chamber President Tom Donohue said that the campaign, “which he’s dubbed the Campaign for Free Enterprise, could become the most important project the Chamber has embraced in its nearly 100-year history”:

Donohue will begin raising money for the project this summer and roll it out in stages. As envisioned, the campaign will include a grass-roots lobbying component that will tap the strength of the Chamber’s network of small businesses and business and trade associations. A public education ad buy defending the free enterprise system is in the works, as well as an issue advocacy program tied to the 2010 midterm elections. “We’re going to hold politicians accountable as we defend and advance economic freedom,” Donohue said.

Of course, by “defend and advance economic freedom,” Donohue really means that the Chamber will be spending $100 million to try to maintain the pro-corporate status quo in a host of areas. The Chamber plans to try and get its stamp on just about every piece of legislation that’s coming down the pike, including, but not limited to: Cap-and-trade, health care reform, regulatory reform, and corporate tax reform.

Despite the economy’s collapse, and the common sense economic reasons for addressing health care and climate change, the Chamber has decided that these ideas somehow threaten freedom as we know it. Maybe it, like the Heritage Foundation, wants to import the “economic freedom” of dictatorial East Asian city states.

The Chamber has, in the past, engaged in some over-the-top rhetoric to present its point of view. For instance, it called the Employee Free Choice Act a “firestorm bordering on Armageddon,” while claiming that regulating pollution would “strangle the economy.” But calling this project of obstruction and corporatism “the most important” it’s ever done may take the cake, and it certainly shows where the Chamber’s priorities truly lie.