Should these AIG officials due hefty retention bonuses--agreed to before the bottom fell out and grandfathered in previous legislation by Countrywide Chris Dodd--be "ashamed of themselves" for taking their dough? These CNN twits seem to think so.
Hey, I'm down with the seediness of all this but I'm even more down with defending contract law and orderly society. Do we really want a complete breakdown of civil law? Is envy and populism really worth it? Do we want Frank, Dodd and Pelosi running America's companies with some kind of mob mentality?
Congress and Obama need to just shut the hell up and let these people have their money. Going forward they can enact specific restrictions on any future bailouts, remembering next time what they've already done. Maybe write things on post-it notes. Have Frank do it.
Otherwise this pitchfork populism is gonna get somebody killed.
3 comments:
I agree, the law is the law, if they are contractually entitled then they deserve it.
It’s funny how Rep. Bart Gordon calls himself a “blue dog” but is basically walking in lock-step with the expansion of government while also wasting taxpayer money on trips to Europe for him and his wife.
http://tinyurl.com/cwe5wb
mB
I think that people's real issue with this is that a guaranteed bonus, pre-contracted before the fact, is actually not a "bonus". When I was a manager for Starbucks, we had a great bonus program--if your store made the numbers set out by corporate. Sometimes the store made the numbers and we got a little bump in our checks, sometimes we didn't. By saying that someone is promised, legally, the incentive before the work is done, especially when that money is tax dollars given to bail out the system these guys messed up...I can see why people are ticked off.
However, what I personally find amusing is the way people are enraged at how a hundred or so guys are getting away with stealing millions, but we seem to forget the millions of people who have thousands of dollars in credit card debits which they really don't intend to pay back. Doesn't that hurt us even more?
We are so excited that there are these high profile guys in the spotlight who we can point to as the cause of all our woes, yet we still go on vacations and live our lives, avoiding the tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt Americans amass. When you take things without paying for them, either by hustling the system or ignoring your debt, it STILL weakens our GNP. We are like the "bottle a day" drunks who don't think we are alcoholics because the guy at the other end of the bar drinks twice as much.
We can't depend on Big Daddy government to solve all our problems, and we have to admit the roll WE play in the downturn if we ever plan to get ourselves out of this mess.
Post a Comment