Well, sure. But think of it this way - if you’d been smart enough to be one of those six-figure executives, Sam would be defending you.
Is it Sam’s fault that you chose to be a pobe instead of one of the elite?
-Joe
Hmm less AIG execs, or less teachers? I’m kind of glad more people choose to be teachers tbh.
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You can’t have two thousand “executives” in one company. With all due respect, I don’t think you know what an “executive” is, and
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You aren’t getting the money back either way, so don’t get your hopes up.
I don’t expect to get it back, but I see no reason these pricks should get a dime of it. If their company can’t pay their bonuses, that’s not my fault and not my problem. All the violins for these poor people allegedly depending on these bonuses to feed their families are not moving me an inch. If they all end up eating out of dumpsters, I’m perfectly fine with that. Appeals to sympathy are not going to work. They still make more than me.
With all due respect, you’re picking nits. I used the wrong noun, I admit, mea culpa, Hail Mary, the goddamn point stands. Don’t think that through pointing out an irrelevant detail like the noun I used scores you a point.
Well, maybe. For instance, its not unknown for a company to categorize a line worker as a “manager” if it aids in fucking him out of overtime pay.
It only effects the employees who were responsible for insuring sub-prime mortgages? I wasn’t aware of that, I thought it was a tax on all AIG employees.
Oh wait! It is!
And these are employees who are highly paid and are significantly more likely to invest money rather than save it, just as are all the employees at all the banks and other companies that the government is jumping on, besides AIG. I’d venture to bet that all the people who the government is forcing to work for free, to not take bonuses, to not go out spending money–that these are probably a significantly large chunk of the economy. 10%, 15%, who knows? But that’s 10 or 15% that’s counteracting the stimulus package. And they’re all just people, caught up in the same crisis as everyone else.
If a company is to blame because of their internal method of running, fine tell them they have to make X and Y changes and pay back the money they were lent to save them over the next decade. But punishing the employees who are entirely unrelated to what happened is just vengeful catharsis. It makes no sense either logically, nor economically.
Well, no, it doesn’t. As a matter of fact, whether the tax applies to EXECUTIVES or not is a rather important point. Executives are ultimately responsible for the company’s fortunes and deserve nothing if the company fails. But employees below them may, in fact, not be responsible for the company’s failure.
Like it or not, Sam is right; the net is being cast so wide that a lot of people are going to be screwed for something that isn’t their fault.
I don’t care who gets the bonuses or what their responsibility is. They’re still not entitled to MY money.
This is like some kind of sicko reverse socialism going on – taking from the working poor and giving to the rich. It’s amazing that the same conservatives who break out in a cold sweat at the the idea that some poor welfare mom might get away with an extra can of beans, or even worse, some Mexican kid might get some free medical care now expect us to collapse in tears at the thought that Biff Biffington might have to cancel his vaction to the Bahamas or miss a payment on his Jag if the taxpayers don’t give him his bullshit retention bonus.
Fuck all those people, man. fuck them in the ass with a big rubber dick. I don’t care if they starve to death. I don’t care if they freeze to death. Their personal welfare is of no consequence to me whatsoever. I’d still rather give $100 to a study on the shitting habits of grub worms than give one cent to these fat, entitled ticks.
Because the government has to obey the bloody rules, the same as everyone else. I have disagreed with the bailout from the start, but calling backsies like this means agreements with the government aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.
Wasn’t it the Democrats who got behind Bush to support the bailout? And a whole bunch of people here were ranting at the evil Republicans for dooming us all by not helping?
It’s not “backsies” because they aren’t taking it from the company, they’re taking it from individuals paid by the company. There was no agreement not to tax bonuses after they’ve been given.
Unless you know something about the tax curve and income distribution that I don’t, it’s taking from the rich of tomorrow and giving to the rich of today.
I’m going to be rich tomorrow? That’s good news. What’s going to happen? Powerball? Those two dimes I put on yak belly futures are going to blow up? Angelina Jolie’s going to want to pay me lavishly to be her next baby daddy?
No, nor am I, but the facts are AIG misused the money and paid bonuses, not the employees. Typically kneejerking pols aim at the wrong target and unleash a torrent of tripe instead of addressing the actual problem. This is bad law, bad policy and a bad decision.
To hear the wanker from NY talk (Schumer?) you’d think the employees had runoff with the church poorbox, when it was AIG who actually DID.
What’s next, making the vendors who sold AIG coffee and donuts pay back their tips?
The criminals are still working for AIG. The bad guys are STILL in power, what’s more, the assmonkeys that GAVE them the cash in the first place still have jobs. I’d call that a fail all the way around.
I hope somebody comes to their senses about this before it becomes law.
So you’re opposed to all of Obama’s bailout plans of the banks? We’ve got something in common!
Here’s the thing - you can justify support for a bailout. You can justify opposing bailouts. What you can’t justify is supporting a bailout, then doing everything in your power to speed the demise of the company you are bailing out. That’s just stupid behavior.
These bonuses were ‘retention bonuses’. The program was put in place last year because AIG knew its commissions were going to collapse, and it didn’t want to lose its best people to its competitors. So it offered a bunch of them bonuses to make up for the shortfall in commissions from AIG’s collapsed business model. These bonuses were deemed important enough that Chris Dodd has a special exemption for them written into the TARP program (well, it helps that AIG employees were some of his biggest campaign contributors, but I digress).
AIG certainly felt that this was money well spent - this wasn’t fatcats at the top voting themselves golden parachutes or voting each other crazy bonuses in a mutual back-scratching frenzy. This was the company deciding that it needed to take quite a bit of its precious remaining cash and dole it out to its best people, or they’d leave and deal the company a fatal blow, because it was hard to imagine AIG being able to replace its best performers in the current environment.
So now they have the bailout, and all these people are not only going to forego 90% of their bonuses if this stupid bill passes, but they’ll have essentially been screwed over by staying with the company on the promise of income that’s never coming. And even if the bill fails, a lot of damage has been done because these people have been demonized and they certainly know now which way the wind is blowing.
I’ll bet we see a lot of turnover at AIG in the next while, which will make it more likely that the 170 billion dollars the Feds pumped into them will go down the drain along with those bonuses. That’s a hell of a price to pay for your 178 million dollar pound of flesh.
Can we bring back the stocks for the guys who run AIG?
In a process of taking the rich’s money and giving it to the rich, you’re actually not involved–unless you’re rich. It’s one of those definitional things. So you can actually sit back and relax in the comfort of knowing that the rich of tomorrow are getting screwed over. I think you’ll also discover that when the economy is healthy and stable that your own situation in life is a more joyous one and hence it’s to your advantage for the economy to more quickly become repaired, so you might actually consider cheering for the measures being taken to make that happen.
“Obama’s bailout?” It’s Obama’s bailout now?
I think Obama did what he had to do to avoid a depression. The problem isn’t conceptually with the bailout. The more nationalization the better in my book. The problem was that not enough conditions were written into it.
And I don’t give a shit about those people getting the bonuses, Sam. What part of that is not sinking in? I don’t care how much you think they deserve my money. I don’t want to give it to them. If you’re so concerned about them, then YOU pay their bonuses. Appeals to sympathy are not going to move me an inch. I want to know why it’s in MY best interest to give my money to people who make ten times more than I do when there are kids who need food and health care.
You’re aware that, at that compensation level, depending on where you live and certain other deductions, for the $165 million in bonuses, you’re out about a quarter, right?
I think you may have gotten your money’s worth in righteous indignation, but I’ll tell you what; how about if I send you a check?
All the people who are saying “screw it, break the contracts” don’t realize that every single argument made applies in spades to the people who signed up for mortgages they couldn’t afford. Oh, sorry, that was poor downtrodden workers who just couldn’t understand what they were signing, not for some ‘fatcat’ (defined on the straight dope as “people who make more than I do”). And of course a certain cavalier attitude toward contracts and rule of law makes all this easier for you guys, doesn’t it?
It’s a shame that none of the poor, poor elected officials could have anything like the ability to, oh, know something about contracts before pushing this through. It seems like some group in Congress ought to have stood up and said “this is a bad plan”. Wait, they did…only it was Republicans who did it. I think I recall a pit thread about it.
Yes, bankruptcy was a damn good option. Nationalization was not a bad one. Congress learning how compensation works would have worked, too. So would the idea that Congress could have learned how to negotiate a deal or write a contract (it’s a damn shame - is it that no lawyers will work for them?) .
This, however, is contract by mob rule. It is contract by “I’m pissed off”. It is law by whim and revenge against people whose jobs you neither understand, nor can do. And it is both revolting and horrifying. AIG may be in poor taste. The people proposing this are sickening.
You might want to consider that wrote this contract are the same ones writing the stimulus package.
(I am in no way associated with AIG, the banking industry, unpaid mortgages, or indeed any US Company. I have been paid bonuses when I met my personal contractual obligations but the company failed to meet its; additionally, I have been paid a retention bonus by a company in receivership, at the direction of the bankruptcy committee, assertions about this to the contrary notwithstanding)
Of course this round of bailouts are his. This bailout was his proposal, was pushed hard by his administration, was run by his Treasury Department, was written by Democrats, and passed with only six Republican votes. Actually, a whole bunch of Democrats in the House also voted against it. If you recall, the main objections were that there wasn’t enough transparency, the bill was being rushed without due diligence, and there were insufficient controls on the funds. It sounds like the critics were right.
From January 23:
So… Politicians in Congress of both parties had grave misgivings about the second round of TARP funds, but Obama did a full-court press to get it passed, among other things, promising that there would be enough oversight to prevent something horrible like executives using the money to give out bonuses.
Tell me again why this isn’t Obama’s problem? I’m not saying Bush didn’t help cause the economic crisis - he clearly did. But the TARP money didn’t have to be released this way, and there were plenty of people in the press and in both parties of Congress who saw exactly the kind of problems that might arise, and were promised that the administration was fully in control of the situation.
And now we can clearly see that it wasn’t. In fact, it’s almost Keystone Cops hour over in the White House - Obama claims to be outraged that executives are being paid bonuses, when he personally lobbied to allow just that to happen. Geithner says he only heard about the program two days before he had to give a press conference to explain himself to an outraged public? What kind of oversight was Treasury doing, exactly? Especially when this very issue was raised as a concern two months ago, before the money was released? When Obama promised that the executive compensation problem was covered, did he even have a shred of evidence that it had even been considered?