I strongly disagree with the President's decision to cap executive pay at $500K for (some) bailout recipients. I certainly think he has the right - you want our money, we make the rules - but I think something like $5 million would have been fine. Like it or not, some of these "executives" are not actually spawn of Satan and some of them are very talented. Why would they work for $500K if they could get $10M elsewhere? Especially if they, say, have taken out a mortgage based on future expectations of salary. And I'll just say it - if you're a powerful, wealthy person living in New York City, $500K is not a lot of money.
So, it's clearly written from the perspective of a whiner, but this article about Obama capping total compensation at $500K when his total compensation is quite a bit higher was actually worth reading.
Glenn Beck is willing to go all-in on Obama being a Communist. The last 15 seconds are classic.
Tim Geithner did know he owed the other half of the Social Security and Medicare taxes (if you don't know, US employers pay half of these taxes and you pay the other half. Americans working for int'l organizations are still on the hook for the whole thing even though their employer won't pay it. Geither claims that missing this was the mistake in question). How do we know he knew? He applied - and received - reimbursement for the taxes from the IMF. He later acknowledged a failure to pay the taxes, but didn't actually pay them until his nomination was dicussed. It's all right here in this brochure. (For the record, I don't put a lot into the "rough estimate of $600B" that the article mentions.)
PS - As I was labeling this post, it just made me realize - I want to make it clear that I know I've switched from using "bailout" to using "stimulus", even though the media's switch was arbitrary/socialist.
PPS - I know I've been a little overboard about this recently, but I stand by my "incorrect" ordering of quotation marks and commas above. I used to refer to the "Government Bailout" but I've never referred to the "Stimulus, Package" so I see no reason to put the comma inside the quotation mark.
PPPS - In the first paragraph I said $500K isn't a lot of money for wealthy, powerful New Yorkers. But it's really not a whole lot of money for anyone. Think of it this way, New Yorkers - the proportion of my income that goes to rent is 5.5% before taxes and 7.4% after taxes. Divide your rent by those numbers to see what your income would be if your rent was the same as it is now but it only took the same amount of your income as mine does. My figures do not include utilities.
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Unfortunately, in capping executive pay Obama has to appeal to the public, a group largely composed of morons who do not understand that losing every semi-competent executive does not help a company start to make better decisions. Additionally a lot of the public lives outside of New York City, and we all know how they think of us. I think Obama couldn't avoid a clause along these lines, but he could have executed it a lot more intelligently.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you about the comma outside the quotation mark.
You stole my post about taxes! I think this may mean we need to have a flare war that only ends when a moderator intervenes...uh oh, we are the moderators. This war may go on for quite some time.
Oh shit. You're right. I did actually steal it directly, I just had it sitting up in my tabs for so long that I forgot that's where it came from.
ReplyDelete*shame face*
I guess I can let such an affront slide just this once. I'm watching you, though.
ReplyDeleteI disagree regarding the comma. There are a a lot of words that you wouldn't use a comma with under other circumstances but would in this use. If you were saying "stimulus package" instead of just "stimulus," the commas would go after the word "package." It's just the rule when a phrase that needs a comma ends in a quotation...right?
ReplyDelete