Taxing bonuses
-
- March
- 20
There are so many reasons to be mad about the $165 million in bonuses paid to the AIG executives who ran the financial division that turned our economy into one big shell game (which cup was all that money under, anyway?). Start with the lack of regulation, move on to the haste with which the initial bailout was foisted upon us, and then the follow-up bail out—all of them are enough to make the blood boil. Then, too, you can be mad about the wreckage those way-too-high-stakes poker players brought upon the rest of us: the lost jobs, the foreclosed homes, the downsizing of our dreams. Finally, the audacity of AIG to provide, and the employees themselves to accept, retention bonuses with the money the government provided to save their company—that’s just too much to bear. Â Besides, why would any company want to retain the brainiacs who perpetrated the credit default swap felony upon us?
So anger is clearly the emotion of the moment and deservedly so. But the response from Congress is scary. The house just passed a bill that would impose a 90 percent tax on the bonus money. This amounts to re-writing the tax code for the purpose of punishment, doesn’t it?
That would seem to have the potential to set a very bad precedent. Â So, dear blog readers, what do you think? Are you for the bonus tax, or against it?
This entry was posted
on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 2:00 pm by Debra West.
| 
Email This Post
As you said, it is quite a tough position to be in, but this is exactly what happens with big government. The government getting involved in the private sector only leads to messes such as these and there is no one to blame, other than the government. This is why I find it absurd when Obama pushes a $780 billion bill and tells Congress that this is ESSENTIAL (when in reality, that is arguable) and needs to be passed fast even if the Congressmen didn’t get a chance to read it. It is absolutely crazy. I don’t support most of the bailouts and stimuli, but even if you are for it don’t you think you owe it to yourself and your country to atleast read it and analyze all possible outcomes that could come from it before just passing it? In the case of the AIG bailout, they could’ve made some sort of deal with the company, where they would only receive the bailout if their executives agreed to restructure their contracts without bonuses. It is the lack of foresight and thought that caused this AIG problem and because of the way the Obama administration is acting, we can expect a lot more of these problems in the future.