Yes, congress has taken on the personality of an angry mob who is out to hang any one they don't like, agree with, or who happens to make big bonuses. In congress' latest action, they recently passed a bill to tax certain individuals’ bonuses from AIG at a 90% rate.
Sure AIG should have never paid those bonuses, no doubt! We all can certainly agree with that. But there are two bigger stories the press isn’t focusing.
The first story is the mod mentality of our elected officials. The headlines should be saying “Congress Hang AIG Executives.” We should be concerned when congress gets angry and then tries to pass laws slapping this certain class of people with penalties that would clearly violate our constitution. Yet, the press glazes over this act and fails to point out how this kind of congressional leadership is akin to an angry dictator slapping any one they want with extra taxes who disagrees with them or their philosophy.
It even concerns me more that the public is so blinded by this congressional action that they are not raising up and questioning their congress person. When our congress takes actions because it feels good, and that action is clearly unconstitutional, we’re all in trouble. They have sent a message that the rule of law means nothing to them and that they are above the rule of law. This AIG special tax is an example of an angry mob ignoring the rule of law in two areas.
The first area is the obvious constitutional issue of passing laws aimed at specific class of individuals. Congress can not select classes of people and pass laws to control those people. We are a nation of equal rights and equal laws. In other words, in the AIG case, they have decided to issue a special tax for those people. The tax has nothing to do with income levels. It solely had to do with working at AIG. So if Congress decides they don’t like the money the executive make at Apple, they could pass the same laws. Absolutely absurd!
The second law broken was making a law retroactive or back dating after the event occurred. Congress can not retroactively tax individuals. Can you imagine one day waking up to discover on your pay check they have taken your whole pay check because congress decides to increase the tax rate dating back to 2007 and make it retroactive? How scary is that!!!
And finally, congress has thrown out contract law and ignored the fact contracts must be upheld otherwise they become worthless. Our entire economy is based on contract laws and when our elected officials can merely ignore those laws any time they get angry, then what makes us any different than a third world dictatorship?
What is concerning to me is our president says he would have signed the bill! My lord what have we done!
Second, AIG has received $170 billion to bail them out. So the obvious question is where’s the $169,836,000,000? Now doesn’t seem more important to focus on the big picture here…like who cares about $164 million when there is another $169.8 billion going somewhere else! Sure I don’t want those slime buckets at AIG getting it, but we have a much bigger issue and why aren’t our congress people making an issue out of that?
Let me help you understand where the $169.8 billion has gone to…big picture…60% to foreign entities and countries and 40% to U.S. companies like Merrill Lynch, Goldman sack (Paulson’s old company), Bank of America, etc. Now where is the congressional outrage here! If there was ever a place where congress could impose their Nazi mob mentality it is here! Cancel those foreign contracts! Our tax dollars are going to support those foreign companies. Am I missing something here! And they are worried about $164 million!!!!
And finally, the story not even being mentioned let alone told, is the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac stories. The purpose of these two entities was to create liquidity in the residential real estate markets. They would buy mortgages from banks and accumulate these mortgages. Where do they get the money to buy those mortgages? Simple, from investors looking for a safe home – or at least they thought it was a safe home – and most of those investors are foreign countries looking for a safe place to park, say a few billion here and a few billion there. Now who has that kind of money? Yes, you guessed it the Chinese just to name a major investor.
Over the years Freddie and Fannie accumulated $2+ trillion in mortgages. All of us know what’s happened to real estate in the past two years. Common sense tells us the value of that $2+ trillion has taken a dive. But since these two entities are government owned now, we can’t get information about what’s going on with their books and how much have they borrowed from the tax payers to pay those debts to countries like China? I can assure you it is a whole lot more than $170 billion paid to AIG.
If our congress wants to save the tax payers $164 million from bonuses paid to AIG, that’s fine. But we deserve a congress who oversees the whole forest and not the blade of grass on the forest floor. There are hundreds of billions of our tax payer dollars going to foreign companies and governments. These companies made investment decisions and accepted the risk, albeit no one knew how risky it truly was, and they should suffer the consequences of their risk taking. I don’t see any one bailing out my 401K!
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