Comments on: House Passes Measure to Tax Bonuses

By: gerryf

gerryf — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 02:56:29 +0000

Not sure how to respond to this whole thing….Alan, are you saying we should be mad that congress corrected a mistake?

I do agree that this has clouded the much larger issue, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore the greedy excess (or frankly casual indfference) of AIG execs.

How about we do both–correct the bonus issue AND step our efforts in review and oversight. I am not going to lose one bit of sleep over the populist uprising….

By: Del Patterson

Del Patterson — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 22:16:05 +0000

First, let’s make sure that we all understand that the bonuses were promised months ago. Second, both the Fed and the Treasury Dept signed off on the bonuses and knew full well that payment was part of contractual law and not something that was capricious.
Angry, hell yes, put this country was based on the rule of law and not on flippant “let’s-go-get-them-and-shut-them-down”.

By: Trescml

Trescml — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:12:39 +0000

Although I wish that Congress used foresight instead of hindsight, they did show self preservation. I think the bigger implication of the populist uprising is that no more bailout money is going to get through Congress until after midterm elections (if then). Maybe that is a good thing, but AIG biting the hand that owns it is going to tie the hands of the Obama adminstration or cause them to be far more creative (like the trillion bucks that just got poured into the economy). The risk is the creative moves may cause unintended or bad consequences.

By: kranky kritter

kranky kritter — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:49:56 +0000

I wholeheartedly agree that it would be nice if such episodes taught congressfolk not to legislate hastily.

However, you gotta admit that congress’s apparently almost unlimited power of mulligan does make it a largely moot point. Bills like this are sort of like MS Bloatware…you release a beta version, you let the poor users find the flaws, then you do some patches. So much easier than getting it right the first time.

By: ExiledIndependent

ExiledIndependent — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 19:16:18 +0000

Ridiculous populist political theater intended to assuage Americans’ anger over how the government has handled this and to distract from the government’s own role in the process. By the way, who is the mysterious person from the Treasury dept. who leaned on Dodd to include the bonus protection in the stimulus bill? Is anyone even interested in finding out? And, by the way, has anyone bothered to look at who’s campaign coffers AIG has been filling?

I’m about to hurl.