The administration used its ingenuity to fund programs without recourse to congressional appropriations. Between 2012 and 2014, U.S. financial enforcement agencies collected $139 billion in fines from the banks they regulated—an amount larger than the entire federal budget in the early years of the Vietnam War. That fines could serve as a form of taxation was a principle familiar to anyone who had ever driven through a small-town police speed trap, and in 1998 a consortium of state attorneys general had, through the courts, confiscated as damages a quarter-trillion dollars of tobacco
...more
