The media has been running hard to keep up with the American public lately, to remind us that we're enduring a collective "public outrage" at A.I.G. for awarding a gaggle of failed company executives millions of dollars in contractually agreed bonuses. Bonus money that was paid by the federal government, an interest bearing debt now neatly saddled on the backs of American taxpayers.
Several news reports emerged over the weekend that A.I.G. employees in an affluent suburb of Connecticut were receiving death threats, on the heels of New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo releasing the names of those that were awarded large payments.
Sifting through the sensational and unsavory headlines though, I'm beginning to feel that our anger is entirely misplaced.
Congress hastily pushed through a measure, supported by President Obama, that will enforce a 90% tax liability to those A.I.G. employees that received bonus payments.
For the love of yo-yo-ma, this is all so ridiculous.
This is all nothing more than an egregious and glaring example of politicians, once again, failing to supplicate at a most basic human level.
The government chose to hand over hundreds of millions of dollars to A.I.G., without a most basic clause set in place to avoid this type of fiasco. In fact, President Obama had requested such safeguards be placed in the contractual language of the governments agreement to bail out A.I.G., only to have such common sense wisdom be ignored by Connecticut Senator, and Finance Committee Chairman, Christopher Dodd.
Dodd would make a helluva efficient gastrointestinal doctor. He managed to stick it to 300-million-people in one stroke of the pen.
We often hear of politicians brushing poor policy decisions off as a simple "mistake". It's time that ultimate accountability be taken by the Congressional majority and our President. A mistake is a direct result of a bad decision. They need to take accountability for not only the decision to hand over such a heady amount of scratch to A.I.G. with no strings attached, but also take accountability for the politically mucky outcome of their decision.
Simply blaming A.I.G. for what the President calls their "unconscionable" choice to award these bonus payments and then taxing them at 90% (90-percent!) is reducing themselves (Democrats) to the low level of morality legislators that our electorate rejected at the polls from the Republican party in 2006 and 2008.
A.I.G. has done nothing legally wrong. The government, however, has set a very dangerous precedent.
I'm beginning to lose hope. I don't see change.
No matter how hard I look for it.
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- Max Fischer
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1 comment:
Max, while I wholeheartedly agree that the 90% bonus tax is nothing more than Congressional grandstanding, I think it's too early to lose hope.
It's true the "optics" of this are bad, as the pundits like to say. And with a 24/7 news media hungry for controversy and a frustrated nation sidelined in wait, optics matter.
Unfortunately, optics have little to do with the realities these people are dealing with as they try to get something as massive, complex and uncertain as the American economy moving forward again (and to do so with enough agreement among partisan people who have NO certainty in any outcome they back--political or otherwise).
I am growing weary of each fresh outrage over how the government and/or the bankers are taking advantage of us poor taxpayers. What do we want from them, in all honesty? We want them to say they were sorry and find a way to return us to the overstuffed lives we were leading--which were, to a great extent, the by-products of Wall Street's creative mischief in the first place.
Truth is, we put ourselves in this mess just as much as they did. We all drank the kool-aid of too-low taxes, too-high 401K returns, home "investment" rather than ownership, etc. We all wanted in on the gains these mythical derivatives were creating--whether it was through hedge funds or house flipping. Or just plain easy credit and a no-money-down 50-inch high-def TV for the OTHER living room.
Fast money, good credit, more stuff. That's been the name of the game, and just because we aren't taking million-dollar bonuses doesn't mean we too didn't expect a whole lot more from our work than we deserved.
From the Wall Street executive to the Main Street construction worker, most people seem to want and expect the government to fix this problem. Yet we're so easily "outraged" when it attempts to do so in a fashion we find too risky, too morally hazardous or too slow.
I am choosing to park my outrage for a while. Let it ride. Accept a little imperfection, failure and hypocrisy along the way. Have patience. Have hope.
I certainly don't know what the answer is. More intervention, less intervention, no intervention? But I do know that levying penalty taxes to earn some populist votes a year from now is a slippery slope.
What reaction will the next "outrage" bring?
Could it be we've all become confused into thinking "outrage" is just a backwards country song: play it enough times and it will bring back our houses, our jobs, our big-screen TVs...?
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