as the unwashed masses finally wake up to the fact that the very rich of Wall Street have been plundering and looting to the point where it make the old Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous look like a collection of pikers. When Bear Sterns crashed they had an article in the NYT how some of the net wealth of their execs had dropped from 800 million to 500 million WTF does someone do with that kind of money?

i don't like the bonuses, but this legislation is basically price controls. price controls never work.

Obama screwed up by not making a cut in bonus pay a condition of the bailouts.

surprised that Republicans would vote for this.

by the way, i'm not a republican - i just don't think ad-hoc, knee-jerk price control legislation works.

The bill of attainder question is still open since they applied only to those taking over $5 billion. That excludes most TARP recipients. Why didn't they just make it apply to all recipients? And $250,000 seems awfully generous, not to mention the first thought I had was the recipients will split the bonuses into multiple $250,000 bonuses.

I don't see this as price controls. It seems like just attaching conditions less strenuous than what these execs would face if they applied for food stamps.

The bill itself is mostly symbolic. After all, a lot of the bad decisions leading to the need for a bailout were made in 2007 and previous, and no one is going back in time to recover bonuses issued those years. And, of course, even all of the bonuses combined is just a small fraction of AIG's questionable outlays. But it's a good symbolic.

What's better is that the public outrage to political consequences ratio was large enough to break the lock-step Republican solidarity for the banker's interests. It's unfortunate that more mundane but ultimately more useful issues don't spark as much public outrage.

The government using its taxing power to extract bonuses from people who it has unilaterally determined to be undeserving (even though their employer believes they validly have the bonuses coming) -- what could possibly go wrong?

AIG clearly has some poor decision makers and maybe even some bona fide idiots working there. But to say that ALL bonus recipients are undeserving isn't just careless and lazy -- it's scary and unethical. Some of them were probably doing their jobs quite well and didn't contribute to the company's failures.

The money at stake is inconsequential in the big picture -- the sole purpose is to tax bonuses away from people who the government has decided do not deserve it. Threaten AIG, cajole AIG, scold AIG, shame AIG -- do any of these things to get the money back. But to tax it away is....scary.

I wonder what those guys in Boston Harbor 250 years ago would think of this.

One small step toward economic justice, one giant leap for the dawning public realization that many rich people have done nothing to justify their wealth.

Personally I'm far from rich. But since when do rich people need to justify their wealth? If the question is, "What does a person do with $500 million", the answer is "none of your damn business."

And just to be clear -- we all agree that the only reason the AIG bonuses are believed to be inappropriate is that government bailout money is involved...right? In other words, if it were any other company it would be OK and none of our business. God I hope we still agree on that.

...so the richest and most powerful could take massive amounts of taxpayer money to pay for their own mistakes -- and then reward themselves richly for their failures, with that same taxpayer money -- and suffer no penalties whatsoever.

I have the feeling that if you were on the dock at Boston Harbor back then, the Sons of Liberty would have tossed you in, too.

FT, did it ever occur to you that a comapny that owes it's survival to your and my tax dollars should noty be paying out any bonuses at all? Y'know, a bonus is something extra - and AIG has NOTHING extra to give.

< Threaten AIG, cajole AIG, scold AIG, shame AIG -- do any of these things to get the money back. But to tax it away is....scary.>

In other words, doing anything that actually has effect instead of relying on the goodness of heart of te AIG execs is scary. We've already seen how well that sort of self-regulation works, I think.

I suspect they'd be amazed that any corporation would be allowed to grow so large and so powerful that such a bailout would be necessary in the first place. I seriously doubt the main target of their ire in a fiasco such as this would be a tax on enormous payoffs funded by the government.

"I wonder what those guys in Boston Harbor 250 years ago would think of this."

I speculate that they'd think we were all stupid as HELL to let corporations achieve this kind of power. Most of them were opposed to royalty, and corporate dominance of our political system is functionally not dissimilar. They'd certainly have questions about why the hell the government was giving tax dollars to a failing business.

It would take at least a few hours to catch them up on how the USA is actually "working" today vs. the colonies 250 years ago, but they were smart, educated, rich guys. They would have been able to follow the history.

The fact that this "solution" is so distasteful is a result of how stupid our PROBLEM is, not how horrible this specific legislation is.

Like a guy who asked me if it was anti-capitalistic for the government to limit executive compensation as paid out of bailout funds...yes, perhaps. But it is not NEARLY as "anti-capitalistic" for the government to limit exec compensation as it was for the government to bail out the companies in the first place.

'Personally I'm far from rich.'

Yes, there are many poor and middle class folks who defend the right of the rich to do whatever they want, however they want, regardless of the expense to society as a whole. I believe the correct term for such people is "masochists".

'But since when do rich people need to justify their wealth? If the question is, "What does a person do with $500 million", the answer is "none of your damn business.'

You are askinig the wrong question. The relevent inquiry is "How did a person accumulate $500 million?" And the answer is of course, everyone's business. Just ask Bernie Madoff's buddies

'And just to be clear -- we all agree that the only reason the AIG bonuses are believed to be inappropriate is that government bailout money is involved...right? In other words, if it were any other company it would be OK and none of our business. God I hope we still agree on that.'

The fact that the bonues are paid for by our taxes does make them especially egregious yes. But we all still pay for such funneling of money to the top 1% of the population one way or another, and I'm one of that crowd that thinks concentration of wealth at the top is a really really bad idea, and high taxes on the rich are the best way to remedy that. I suspect I'm in the majority here on that point. Ooooh, scary!