This week, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was out about town arguing that he needed more powers to fix the mess we’re in. On Monday night he spoke to this issue at a Wall Street Journal dinner:

“It is a terrible, tragic thing that this country came into this crisis with such limited tools for trying to protect the economy itself from the kind of distress that would come as the system came back down to earth."

Now, Geithner's clearly a sharp guy, but his memory concerning all the extraordinary new powers given to his office is about as short as his memory concerning his own taxes. This Treasury Department has more raw power at its disposal than any Treasury in recent memory.

In fact, one of the most frightening things going on right now is watching the Federal Reserve and the Treasury spending and printing trillions of dollars without any really meaningful Congressional checks or balances.

The Treasury is supposed to be just one instrument of one branch of government -- the executive. But Treasury has now been given its own spending authority when Congress gave it unbridled powers to spend Troubled Asset Relief Program money as it pleased…that's $700 billion so far, with more coming from a mysterious "reserve fund."

Then, there is the Fed's direct subsidization of Treasury spending by printing money to buy Treasury bills.

The question here is not if this will cause real inflation, but when and by how much. Inflation is the cruelest tax of all, so here again the Treasury has found new tools that go way beyond its Constitutional authority.

So how much more power does Mr. Geithner want? So far he hasn’t been asked about the consequences of Treasury usurping far more power than the Constitution mandates. 

Hopefully, somebody will ask him about the consequences and the dangers of his power grab -- before he simply takes it.