{"id":938,"date":"2009-03-18T06:37:26","date_gmt":"2009-03-18T14:37:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/?p=938"},"modified":"2009-03-19T16:32:10","modified_gmt":"2009-03-20T00:32:10","slug":"congress-in-a-lather-over-bonuses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/congress-in-a-lather-over-bonuses\/","title":{"rendered":"Congress in a lather over “bonuses”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Congressman

Congressional inquiry of AIG retention payments<\/p><\/div>\n

I put “bonuses” in quotes for two reasons.\u00a0 The first is a technical objection.\u00a0 This use of the word bonuses is quite different from the idea of bonuses as most people are used to hearing it.\u00a0 My mother-in-law in Missouri says it’s ridiculous for people who destroyed a company to be rewarded for doing so.\u00a0 That’s an understandable interpretation of what is happening here, if one simply takes the headlines literally.\u00a0 The story would be a lot less compelling if the headline were, “Executives collecting fixed payments from old contracts.”\u00a0 Those are payments from contracts, by the way, that the government has known about<\/a>, and protected in the recent stimulus law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The second reason for the scare quotes is that this frothing by the government has nothing to do with bonuses, however they’re characterized.\u00a0 This has to do with fear.\u00a0 Congress is afraid that if they are seen as bad stewards of our money, the public will become less willing<\/a> to let them grab another trillion of it.\u00a0 Obama is afraid that if his administration is seen as rewarding failure<\/a>, then his popularity will suffer, which will endanger the rest of his agenda.\u00a0 In other words, our goverment officials are afraid the people will know the truth about what they are really doing.<\/p>\n

Folks, the people already know that Congress wastes more per hour<\/a> than AIG can pay out in a year’s worth of bonuses.\u00a0 While we are easily manipulated by the outrage machine that is our political system, we eventually figure it out.<\/p>\n

We will see how silly it is that Geither threatens to give AIG only $29.835 billion instead of $30 billion<\/a> to “claw back” the “bonuses.”\u00a0 (That’ll show ’em!)<\/p>\n

We will eventually see the futility of government suing to get back these bonuses, as Barney Frank recommends, by spending tens of millions of dollars on a losing case whereby the bonus recipients will win additional awards for tortious interference<\/a>.\u00a0 And we will know that it is we who will pay for it all, even if we have forgotten that that we’re paying for a few extra minutes of grandstanding by Mr. Frank and his colleagues.\u00a0 (Don’t worry; I’ll remind you<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

We will eventually recoil at the willingness of a government officials sworn to uphold the constitution passing and signing unconstitutional acts, like confiscation of money of a highly targeted group of individuals.\u00a0 (I only wish it were equally unconstitutional to give money to highly targeted individuals.)<\/p>\n

I don’t know what I’d prefer, Congress wasting time on $165 million of unwarranted (but legitimate) payments, or Congress actively looking for ways to spend more of our children’s money<\/a> billions at a time.<\/p>\n

UPDATE:\u00a0 Here is an excellent summary of the actual contract under contention at Dealbook<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I put “bonuses” in quotes for two reasons.\u00a0 The first is a technical objection.\u00a0 This use of the word bonuses is quite different from the idea of bonuses as most people are used to hearing it.\u00a0 My mother-in-law in Missouri says it’s ridiculous for people who destroyed a company to be rewarded for doing so.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-scandal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=938"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":979,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938\/revisions\/979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}