Why the AIG Bonuses were not wrong.
First let me say that I understand that we’re hurting financially and to see what seems to be a company responsible for our plight to be rewarded can raise the ire of a thousand injustices. The problem is that this feeling is devoid of reality.
Put yourself in the position of an AIG employee, wealthy or not, if you worked there it wouldn’t take long for you to be looking for a lifeboat and jump ship as soon as the collapse began. With that in mind, how does AIG fix remedy their financial situation if everyone with the knowledge to help leaves the company. Now as someone in charge at AIG, you receive billions of dollars from the government that has almost no restrictions and in fact actually protects bonuses guaranteed before February. It’s rather simple isn’t it? You need to give the employees incentive to stay and according to testimony before congress the receiver’s of these bonuses had certain requirements to meet in order to qualify for their bonuses. While it is certainly unfair that a company get rewarded for failing, it is absolutely unfair to promise an employee a metric based reward, protect that bonus in legislation, and then when you’re about to give the money to those it is owed to you decide you’re going to punitively tax those people at 90%. That is quite frankly un-American.
The other thing that it seems that no one is addressing… If you believe the “stimulus” plan; you need the private companies to willingly want to work with the government… I would rather my business fail than become what the federal government is forcing on them.
I was never an Obama supporter but i never imagined that he would attack the very tenets that our country was founded on… The original promise of America was guaranteeing its citizens protection from the government a freedom to pursue Life, Liberty, and Property. This is the kind of thing that leads to revolutions and not the electoral kind.
Of course, that’s just my opinion, i could be wrong. (To quote Dennis Miller from back in the day.)
