Explanation for the inexplicable
Time to change the subject.
AIG got $165M in bonuses shoveled to its top executives. This is apparently unpalatable for the majority of Americans, but I happen to agree with President Obama on this point: It is a distraction. From the $170 billion from which the stinky bonuses came. One one-thousandth of the money, more or less.
And I can understand perfectly how bad this looks. It really DOES look bad. But here's one explanation.
When you give bailout money to save a company, it's up to that company to decide how best to spend it. If the government wants to tell AIG how to spend the money, they might as well take it over. And the rest of the failed and teetering banks, too. And about as many people favor that option as are outraged about the bonuses.
If Congress had put in restrictions, AIG would have ignored them anyway. So Dodd and the Treasury Department and even Obama know this to be true: If they'd made the bailout $165 million lighter, or put in some sort of safeguard preventing them from handing out the bonuses, that much less money would have gone to addressing the actual problems.
Those bonuses were going to be the first thing paid--no doubt about it. And if the greedy AIG executives left the rest of the money--99.9% of it, literally--to address their company's problems, then there really isn't a problem here.
Plenty of heat. Not much light.
AIG got $165M in bonuses shoveled to its top executives. This is apparently unpalatable for the majority of Americans, but I happen to agree with President Obama on this point: It is a distraction. From the $170 billion from which the stinky bonuses came. One one-thousandth of the money, more or less.
And I can understand perfectly how bad this looks. It really DOES look bad. But here's one explanation.
When you give bailout money to save a company, it's up to that company to decide how best to spend it. If the government wants to tell AIG how to spend the money, they might as well take it over. And the rest of the failed and teetering banks, too. And about as many people favor that option as are outraged about the bonuses.
If Congress had put in restrictions, AIG would have ignored them anyway. So Dodd and the Treasury Department and even Obama know this to be true: If they'd made the bailout $165 million lighter, or put in some sort of safeguard preventing them from handing out the bonuses, that much less money would have gone to addressing the actual problems.
Those bonuses were going to be the first thing paid--no doubt about it. And if the greedy AIG executives left the rest of the money--99.9% of it, literally--to address their company's problems, then there really isn't a problem here.
Plenty of heat. Not much light.
