U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner

Ummm. Haven’t we heard this before? The Treasury needs a ginormous wad of cash to bail out the financial system and it will explain just what it will do with all that money…later.

Yeah it’s deja vu in DC with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner doing his best Hank Paulson imitation while announcing the Obama Administration’s $2.5 trillion plan to save the banks.

Come again? Two-point-five-what? Trillion? As in 1,000,000,000,000? Yes, $2.5 trillion.

The plan is to use the unspent half of the original $700 billion “Bush bailout” and then commit as much as another $2.15 trillion in taxpayer money to help sort out the good banks and good loans from the bad while closing the difference between what millions of Americans owe on their homes and what their homes are worth.

The plan as presented, tanked.

As the NY Times put it, “the initial assessment of the plan from the markets, lawmakers and economists was brutally negative, in large part because they expected more details.”

Republicans and Democrats alike were openly hostile to the idea as it was vaguely presented. Alabama Republican Richard Shelby summed the problem up best in a blunt question to Geithner: “Is there a concrete plan here?” Geithner admitted there was not — yet. “You’re right. We are going to be very careful to flesh out the details.”

Wall Street was no more kind (although you might want to pause here and ask, “Who gives a crap what Wall Street thinks? They have about as much credibility here as Chris Brown would as a counselor in a domestic violence clinic).

The central problem is that a majority of Americans were never sold on the fundamental concept that spending $700 billion in taxpayer money to “bail out” the very banks that made horrifically bad and dumb decisions was the right thing to do. Last fall the Bush team managed to take the public’s skepticism and turn it into outright anger by swinging wildly from one plan to another as it spent the first $350 billion in TARP funds.

It didn’t help when bankers used the money to pay giant bonuses (for a job well done!), refurnish their palatial offices (as a reward for excellent management!), and sock away cash for a future buying spree (because that’s what companies do!) instead of actually lending again. And of course that money seems to have done nothing to keep the economy from sliding further into the toilet. How many jobs have been lost since TARP passed? The American public has good reason to be mad and suspicious.

So what the hell is Obama doing sending his Treasury Secretary out to sell another bailout — this one costing and unfathomable $2.5 trillion — without having a solid set of details about how that rather incredible sum will be spent? It’s just plain dumb.

Obama and Geithner tried to soothe frayed nerves by saying details of the critical housing component would come quickly but that’s really not good enough. If Obama learned any lesson from the Bush team it’s that playing a very strong first card works wonders in Washington. Even if it’s a bluff (or a lie — see “Weapons of Mass Destruction”).

Instead the White House will now be playing catch up and defense on what is the single most critical piece of the economic recovery puzzle. Wildly inflated home prices are what got us into this mess and until we can all figure out how much these homes are actually worth, subtract the difference, and determine who’s going to pick up what share of the tab, the economy will not recover.

The Geithner/Obama plan to deal with this may work. Once they figure out what it is.