Our Government at Work, Again: AIG

I’ve been really busy the past couple of days. The next post in the building a church website series will get posted tomorrow or Friday.

Now, on to AIG. I’m quite disturbed by what I’m hearing. On of the reasons I didn’t like either of the bailouts (the one last fall by Paulson and the most recent one) was the speed in which they were constructed and pushed to the American people. Mistakes get made when anything is rushed, especially legislation, and this is no exception. Chris Dodd, of all people, supposedly insterted a clause into the legislation towards the end that would exempt companies from altering contractual agreements by a certain date. Now that Mr. Dodd, the rest of Congress, and the American people see the implications of that clause they are outraged. Oh the irony.

So, since the legislation appears to stipulate that AIG is not doing anything legally wrong, and Congress just doesn’t like it, crazy solutions to this problem are being suggested. One of which is to tax AIG bonuses at 90%. Is that even legal? I hope not. I don’t want the government to be able to tax specific people in specific situations in a way in which could take all of their money from them. Where could that lead?

Another suggestion I saw on TV was to tell AIG that if their executives accept their bonuses that the government will not give them any more money and let them go bankrupt. I laughed out loud at that one. We already gave them $180 billion because they were “too big to fail.” I bet AIG would call the government’s bluff on that one.

Lastly, when the Omnibus bill was passed, we were told that earmarks were only 2% of the entire bill, not a whole lot, so don’t get worried about it. It’s only $8 billion. Well, the AIG bonuses are only .2% if the $180 billion we’ve given them. That’s not a lot. I don’t think we should get too upset at it.