Comrade Drafterman wrote:

On Mar 20, 10:17*am, wrote:
Congressional Democrats want to lecture the private sector about
wasting tax dollars?

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles...D4412-9FD8-42C...

House Passes Bill to tax AIG Bonuses by 90 percent!?

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...asses-bill-tax...

Embracing Evil - A disturbing pattern emerges in the ObaMa0 White
House

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles...EAB6A-97E7-4AF...

Couple of points from the articls:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles...1-9D7AA76EDDF0

"A number of AIG’s recent bonus recipients have voluntarily returned
the entire bonus that they are contractually entitled to receive. To
characterize everyone at AIG as a greedy crook is ugly and unfair."

Well public opinion is greatly influenced by what the media chooses to
report. Everytime I turn on the TV or radio all I hear about are the
bonuses. There is little to no information about employees returning
them. Perhaps you can argue that it is a person's responsibility to
inform themselves independently before coming to such a conclusion,
but if you are going to task everyone to doing their own research that
defeats the purpose of having informative media (i.e. news) to begin
with.

"Big Business in general and AIG, in particular, have alienated
themselves from the American sense of fairness by paying generous
bonuses to executives even when the company loses money. Most
Americans accept bonuses as a well-deserved reward for success."

As far as I understand it, these were not meant to be "performance-
based" bonuses but, rather, "retention-based" bonuses. AIG was
intending to get rid of the "toxic" derivitives marked but getting out
of the complicated contracts - aptly called "unwinding" - is
apparently such an unpleasant prospect that AIG basically took the
approach of bribing the same people that got them into this mess to
eventually get them out. Had this economic situation never happened,
the American populace would have been none-the-wiser. Basically the
money was an acknowledgement that investments in derivatives is not a
tenable, long-term, strategy, and was to prevent the people managing
the accounts from cutting and running if things got bad, like now.

Is the notion of "performance-based" bonuses better or worse than
"retention-based" bonuses? That's for you to decide. I think they are
both pretty sleazy. What is even more asburd is the fact that bonuses
were paid to employees that no longer work at the company.

Unfortunately the entire fourth point is nothing more than a logical
"tu quoque" fallacy, even if everything he stated was factually true.

He blames the focus on AIG as a diversionary tactic constructed by the
government to distract from their own faults. This argument does not
withstand scrutiny. First of all, the bill originally contained
language to limit the amount of money that could be given as bonuses
but this was removed at the last minute. Details are still sketchy
about who and why this happened but it means that the bill was not
constructed with the intention of use as a diversionary tactic.

Congress didn't sit down and go: "Ok, let's not prevent bonuses under
the assumption AIG will give then, then will call attention to that to
prevent attention from being levied at us". Rather, Congress put in
language to prevent bonsues but, for whatever reason, that language
was removed at the last minute.

Secondly, all sources seem to indicate that information about the
bonuses came from news outlets, not Congress. To say that the media
frenzy about AIG is a Congress plot is to suggest that there was some
massive conspiracy that permeates Congress and all news outlets as
well as getting AIG to agree to it.

What is a far more likely scenario is that the whole bonus issue was
either overlooked or dismissed as significant and this media storm was
not predicted.

A media storm was just what the Congresscritters and the Presidunce
wanted. They wanted to shield the fact they were are incompetent at
their job. They didn't read the bill they pushed on to America.

-

Government "help" to business is just as disastrous
as government persecution... the only way a government
can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping
its hands off.
-Ayn Rand