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C’mon, people. It’s only $165 million! What’s the big deal?
This is a trifling amount of money when our economy is on fire and when AIG is hemorrhaging billions.
"Now think about it this way – maybe I’m missing something, but the outrage seems to be about ‘M’s – millions of dollars, right? Hundred and sixty five dollars, OK? I would think that it should be looked at as a pretty big positive because when you go from the ‘M’, maybe you should try to go to the ‘B’s – which is the billions of dollars. And maybe that’s going to even enlighten for the ‘T’ – trillions of dollars."
Sad to say, in the grand scheme of the AIG debacle $165 million is peanuts.
It’s kinda funny being lectured on numerical perspective from the same people that tried to blow up the recovery bill in the midst of the collapse of the global economy because they found 2% of it objectionable, and are as a result of the bill’s passage PROTESTING OBAMA’S SOCIALISM!!11!!!1! by teabagging each other all over the country while encouraging people to ‘Go Galt’ and cheat on their taxes — mostly because the tax rate for the richest 1% of Americans was returned to 1990s levels.
But that’s wingnuts for you.
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you take one of those “peanut” bonuses, give that milion to ten people “if” they can start a business with it and bing,you have a REAL stimulous instead of money that’s going in wealthy person’s bank account
these people have NO clue
It’s still astonishing how insulated these spoiled, pampered, selfish brats are from the rest of the suffering world.
Does Santelli realise how many extra bathrooms you could get for $165M.
They keep this shit up and we’ll have to publicly change the definition of entitlement!!! I suggest we start that now!
You can study a lot of marsh mice for $165m.
Can’t build a train between Disneyland and hookers with it, though.
I’m sure it should not surprise me that people without principle would not understand the objection on principle.
AlbertFaiLL: That is some weak stuff ya got there.
AIG executives– the real cadillac driving welfare queens.
It’ll just pay for the Executive Train Car though.
I’m just glad that Kudlow is there every night to comfort us all … /s
Well gee, it’s not like the folks getting these bonuses are doing things like sitting around and collecting unemployment or some other drain on the economy. Jeez.
This is what’s making it hard for Boehner to try and make hay with this.
You’ve hit on one of the central points to this for me at least- the sense of entitlement that this group of people have. They can’t comprehend what the big deal is… it’s simply their due.
Ian has pointed out that in monetary terms this is small.
My outrage is the disregard– contempt, this was done with.
BREAKING: House votes to tax bailout bonuses at 90%
Yes. Limpy in the morning and Kudlow in the afternoon are there, day after day, to make sure that everyone understands that bad things are never the Republic’s fault.
Call for tax cuts. Blame the Democratic Party. Worship Reagan as a Saint. Repeat tomorrow.
The wingnuts are in a deep hole, and they’re digging as furiously as they can.
It would have made a lot more sense to hand over all this money(not just the bonuses,ALL of it) to individual households. People could buy their homes outright,pay bills,send their kids(and maybe themselves)to college,buy health insurance,new cars,start businesses and farms and maybe even sock away some cash for retirement. That would have made more sense than this. All this money and there are no new jobs,we’re inching closer and closer to high teens in actual numbers of jobless.
I feel so hopeless right now,I’ve been on my 20th interview as of today. For a part time stock clerk job,I’m in competition with business managers and PhDs. I’ve been home raising a family for 15 yrs,it counts for nothing once I step off my front porch.
I pointed out Nate Silver’s analysis on the last thread – we should think about using scare quotes around “bonus” – AIG has some headaches regarding compensation.
I think Nate is onto something when he says we should be talking about compensation in general. The outrage people are expressing could be used to promote discourse and policy action on compensation society wide.
That entitlement shit is a scam. The greatest entitlements ever were from to “greatest generation” to the “greatest generation”.
You’ll forgive me if I don’t click on the Rove video. Cheney and others may outscore him on eviltude, but KR’s role helping put the Ch. Admin. in power — both for what it wrought in the last 8 years and in furthering the nastiness of American politics — make him extra special.
Has anyone else found this?
Or, take one of those bonuses and give it to 10 elementary schools.
It’s criminal what our teachers and kids have to endure because of these “small amounts” being looted by crooks, and therefore “unavailable.”
Think of what could be done with all of those bonuses.
Amen, A Mom!!!!
yup
there should be no bonus on toxic performance, especially if they were contracted to be payed on performance
now, if they were not comensated at all for their years worth of work, (not likely at all) then there can possibly be a minimal compensation for the time they put in, that will not ammount in any case to a million dollars, I think 100,000 is far too much for such toxic performance
I suspect there was a draw against performance otherwise they couldn’t pay their week to week bills, that draw is there compensation
no bonuses on top of any comensation they’ve been payed, however if they have not been payed then minimal compensation for hours spent, certainly not for performance
Couple of reasons this story has developed like it has – one being human it’s hard to grasp the enormity of just how big a billion of anything is -so million billion it’s kind of all the same huge thing in our heads. Douglas Adams pointed out that in order to survive in this universe the last thing we need is a sesnse of perspective.
Also while we may have trouble with the size the of the numbers – we do have a pretty good handle of what the word ‘bonus’ means – and it doesn’t mean being rewarded for wrecking the company – that we understand very well.
And I have to confess to a grim amusement watching all these corporate stooges (including Rush) showing their true colors as they rush to protect folks with lots of money.
The bonus-taxing bill easily passed the House — with 85 Republicans joining the Dems to vote for it and 87 Republicans joined by six Dems voting against it.
Get that? The House GOP Caucus was split down the middle by this thing. No wonder Boehner sounds forlorn — he doesn’t know whether to fish or cut bait here.
I’m sure that he’ll think about his options while in his Tanning Studio.
Ohioan Tropic.
GAH … Ahnuld is destroying the English Language on my TeeVee.
mmmmmmmmmmmmm….I LOVE peanuts. And I LOVE trifles, too!
Could I please have some more, sire?
jeezuss, I think the world has turned upside down.
My suspicion is that the Obama administration knoew very well that these guys were pigs and would act accordingly. He and Geithner knew that they were shameless, greedy, and irresponsible, and that the public would be disgusted.
And they were right. The public, not the Democratic party, is demanding blood.
It’s populist and non-partisan. And it will be useful.
Obama has been so many moves ahead of me during both the campaign and transition that I can’t help but think he’s letting the Wall Street executives show themselves for who they are. NOW we’re not going to hear a whole lot of bitching about reregulating them.
Are Senator Dodd and President Obama going to return the considerable political contributions that they received from AIG?
I think they have a valid point to be made. The bonuses are approved through the stimulus package. They are also .1% of the amount of the bailout of AIG of $170 billion. Obama more than anyone would say that’s not a big deal, he even said during the campaign that “pork barrel spending” is only 1.5% of bills and isn’t that big of a deal. Thats $6 – $8 billion on that last $400 billion bill!!
The Scariest part is that the government wants to select the people that are receiving the bonus and specifically tax them 90% on it. The government does this and it sets president for them to easily do it to whomever it wants and thats scary. Really whats better the government having the money or it being get put into the economy
Republicans love to point fingers at Dodd, Geithner & Obama, but when it came to actually doing something to solve the problem half of them chose to do NOTHING!!!!
Dems need to stay together and keep on working at fixing things.
Can you imagine, for even a moment, can you just imagine what this cohort would do if there had been a news cycle say a year ago concentrating on a failing public school giving thousand dollar bonuses to administrators, or a DMV office with a reputation for long lines giving thousand dollar bonuses to its managers, or a post office that had a terrible record for ontime delivery of mail giving thousand dollar bonuses to its workers. They would be screaming bloody murder! But for AIG executives, “it’s just M’s, not B’s or T’s. Fugedaboudit.”
There is no other way this can be seen, but that their rationale of economic reward has condensed not just to circular logic, but to a quantum mechanical state that has no real world analog: “ we have to pay executives obscenely because they are so valuable and we know they are valuable because we pay them obscenely.”
Intuitively, (I know intuition on complex issues is dangerous, nevertheless, I’ll venture into these troubled waters, pointing out while waving my virtual hands that there’s evidence compatible with this observation) obscene executive compensation packages are NOT completely independent of the economic apocalypse we are seeing – they are one of the causal factors. They handsomely rewarded executives for taking extraordinary risks for short-term gain, ultimately leading to the undoing of businesses and our economy. It is that grip that must somehow be broken. It’s not going to be easy, as we can see: it is a very tight grip.
The bonuses are a sign of the corruption and lack of oversight that regular folks can understand. And the lies: we have been told over and over again that this would be fixed!!!!!! THAT’s why it’s hurting Obama.
By whining that it’s not an important amount they are:
1) leading people to focus on the bigger amounts and begin to question more about what is happening; and
2) pointing out (yet again) that the pain that regular people feel (about their mortgage, rent, salary, or grocery bill) is insignificant to the political class.
Go to it fellas.
Oh, and the bill passed today is full of loopholes. It won’t touch nearly the amount of money people assume it will. So there’s another lie that will result in blowback.
Oh, and the total bonus amounts currently in play are not in millions but at least a BILLION.
And this is the same jerk who was screaming and jumping up and down about losers getting protection from being kicked out of their houses. Now that we’re talking about REAL losers, the ones partially responsible for bringing down our economy and wholly responsible for bringing down AIG, then all of a sudden he isn’t concerned. And Jeff Zucker defends this cretin!
I hate to come anywhere near to even the appearance of agreeing with a Beelzebublican on anything (and I suspect I’m nt really–their point is a smokescreen). But, on the face of it, they are right.
The bonuses are like rigor mortis. They are sign, not substance. The substance is that AIG and the rest of the financial industry is dead. Not resting. Not sick. Dead. Decomposing. So lets stop fretting about symptoms and administering palliatives. Taxing the bonuses is like prescribing aspirin and muscle relaxants for a dead guy–it’s silly and delusional. Time to face reality and bury the corpse.
Sieze AIG. Sieze the counter party banks and hedge funds. Audit. Liquidate. Make the Swiss and Caribean banks name names and numbers. Start the fraud prosecutions and forfeitures. Claw back the bonuses? Yes, but only as a side effect of real, productive work, work that ends in jail time and ruin, not just in slightly higher tax bills and the need to wait a year before buying that next Lamborghini.
Let’s ignore the Santellis and put some effort into getting their owners in the dock.