The response by Congress to AIG's payment with tax money of bonuses to employees is nothing more than poorly considered grandstanding. The imposition of a retroactive confiscatory tax on those particular people violates the Constitution in at least three ways: it singles out particular people who have not violated any law for civil punishment, and it takes the form of a bill of attainer and/or an ex post facto law, both of which are specifically prohibited under the Constitution.
Do I think it was wise for these people to take the bonuses to which they are entitled under contract law? No. Does it even rise to the level of immoral or unethical? Perhaps. But was it illegal? From all I've seen (and lawyers tend not to make judgments on stuff they haven't reviewed personally, so there's my caveat), two things make the Congress' action not just grandstanding but embarrassingly stupid: first, AIG was contractually obligated to make these payments; second, it was the Congress that approved billions of dollars in bailout money with not a single real limit on how it was to be spent. The arrogance, the hypocrisy, the plain old stupidity, are breathtaking.
Shouldn't there be some kind of test these people have to take that shows they're minimally conversant in the particulars of the document that creates the elective offices they hold?
Just A Guy
Showing posts with label bailout. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bailout. Show all posts
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Emanuel's Prophecy Comes True
Rahm, that is...
The supposed bailout bill presently before Congress should be no surprise to anyone who was listening to current White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel during the general election. He gave us a preview last fall when he said the following in a Wall Street Journal interview:
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that, it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before. I think America as a whole in 1973 and 1974 … missed the opportunity to deal with the energy crisis that was before us. For a long time our entire energy policy came down to cheap oil. This is an opportunity - what used to be long term problems, be they in the healthcare area, energy area, education area, fiscal area, tax area, regulatory reform area, things we had postponed or too long that were long term are now immediate and must be dealt with. And this crisis provides the opportunity for us … to do things that we could not do before. The good news is … the problems are big enough that they lend themselves to ideas from both parties for the solution."
In other words, Emanuel sees in the current financial crisis the opportunity to camouflage far left initiatives in the areas of "family planning", "climate change" and multiple pork projects in the 800 billion dollar bill that is ostensibly to provide financial relief to private business. Regardless of your position on whether private companies should receive federal (read yours and mine) funds to rescue them from the results of their own greed and the pandering of the Democrat Congress (can you tell what my position is on this?), if it's a financial bailout it shouldn't contain funding for social programs.
Read Emanuel's last statement again. Then notice that the Democrat House Speaker and the new president have each used the phrase, "We won", to justify pushing through pet projects without asking for "ideas from both parties". This is bullying, plain and simple. I call it socioeconomic rape.
The supposed bailout bill presently before Congress should be no surprise to anyone who was listening to current White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel during the general election. He gave us a preview last fall when he said the following in a Wall Street Journal interview:
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that, it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before. I think America as a whole in 1973 and 1974 … missed the opportunity to deal with the energy crisis that was before us. For a long time our entire energy policy came down to cheap oil. This is an opportunity - what used to be long term problems, be they in the healthcare area, energy area, education area, fiscal area, tax area, regulatory reform area, things we had postponed or too long that were long term are now immediate and must be dealt with. And this crisis provides the opportunity for us … to do things that we could not do before. The good news is … the problems are big enough that they lend themselves to ideas from both parties for the solution."
In other words, Emanuel sees in the current financial crisis the opportunity to camouflage far left initiatives in the areas of "family planning", "climate change" and multiple pork projects in the 800 billion dollar bill that is ostensibly to provide financial relief to private business. Regardless of your position on whether private companies should receive federal (read yours and mine) funds to rescue them from the results of their own greed and the pandering of the Democrat Congress (can you tell what my position is on this?), if it's a financial bailout it shouldn't contain funding for social programs.
Read Emanuel's last statement again. Then notice that the Democrat House Speaker and the new president have each used the phrase, "We won", to justify pushing through pet projects without asking for "ideas from both parties". This is bullying, plain and simple. I call it socioeconomic rape.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)