“An outrageous federal power grab”
The Obama administration has garnered some praise and faced significant heat for the way in which it has handled cash advance bailouts and faced down executive bonuses. I hope they’re prepared for citizen revolt and the necessity for martial law soon, however.
Byron York’s recent piece in the D.C. Examiner:
The House Financial Services Committee, led by chairman Barney Frank, has approved a measure that would, in some key ways, go beyond the most draconian features of the original AIG bill. The new legislation, the “Pay for Performance Act of 2009,” would impose government controls on the pay of all employees — not just top executives — of companies that have received a capital investment from the U.S. government. It would, like the tax measure, be retroactive, changing the terms of compensation agreements already in place. And it would give Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner extraordinary power to determine the pay of thousands of employees of American companies.
The measure is not limited just to those firms that received the largest sums of money, or just to the top 25 or 50 executives of those companies. It applies to all employees of all companies involved, for as long as the government is invested. And it would not only apply going forward, but also retroactively to existing contracts and pay arrangements of institutions that have already received funds.
In addition, the bill gives Geithner the authority to decide what pay is “unreasonable” or “excessive.” And it directs the Treasury Department to come up with a method to evaluate “the performance of the individual executive or employee to whom the payment relates.
Bailed out? Big Brother controls your pay rate now!
The march of socialism is on. Feldman calls it “an outrageous intrusion of the government into private commerce,” and I agree wholeheartedly. Furthermore, she wonders when pay for performance will be applied to our elected officials like Geithner. Whoa! Stop that train right now before it picks up steam
Related Video:
This is slightly off kilter, to say the least. Granted, I do not think that companies, that were not put in the position through no fault of their own, that received bailouts shouldn’t be giving bonuses to people in positions of leadership. (They ran companies like AIG into the ground…on their watch.) That said, I hardly think that the people on the ground floor should be made to suffer because of faults at the highest levels. Not only do they want to tax the rich, but now the middle class has to watch out as well?
I concur. While we need to ensure our tax money actually does what we’re paying for it to do, there should be a salary floor of maybe $100K below which it doesn’t apply. That way, employees can be confident of keeping at least the first $100K of their salary, and they can continue to spend enough money to keep the economy moving.