Two more politicians have decided to cynically squeeze every last ounce of political advantage from Wall Street’s payment of bonuses to its top executives.
TaxNews.com reports that Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Jim Webb (D-VA) have proposed a bill that would impose a tax on bonuses paid by Wall Street banks and other firms that benefited from the 2009 bailouts:
Commenting upon the introduction of the Taxpayer Fairness Act, Boxer said:
“To avert a financial collapse, taxpayers saved ‘too big to fail’ companies. It is outrageous that these companies are now doling out millions of dollars in bonuses while the rest of America feels the pain of their reckless decisions.”
The bill levies a 50% tax on bonuses in excess of $400,000 paid by firms that received $5 billion or more in funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).
Webb, a Virginia Democrat, insisted that the proposals have nothing to do with “class warfare.”
“This is not something that’s going to run the gamut of all executive compensation and bonuses. This is a one shot deal. This is a tax on excessive bonuses of TARP recipients that received more than $5 billion from the American taxpayer in 2009. The Financial Times, a paper dedicated to the free market, editorialized in favor of this position at the end of last year. We believe this is a fair and reasonable approach. It offers equity and a level of fairness to the American taxpayers who bailed these companies out.”
The Senators said that only bonuses received in 2009 would be affected by the legislation. They intend that the revenues generated from the tax would be used to reduce the federal deficit or “to help the nation recover from the recession.”
Of course, this is class warfare. Boxer and Webb are counting on it that the have-nots will “applaud to the very echo that applauds again” their efforts to knock down the haves a few pegs?
It’s populist politics as its very worst.
Related Posts:
- The Big Bonus Strawman
- Class Warfare: The Excessive Compensation Canard
- AIG Bonuses are Less Than 1/10th of a Percentage Point of Total AIG Bailout Funds
- A Bonus Tax in America?
- Executive Pay Limits, a Form of Scapegoating
- Is Congress’ Plan to Retroactively Tax AIG Bonuses Constitutional?
- Just a Litte Bit of History Repeating
2 responses so far ↓
1 Chad Bordeaux // Feb 11, 2010 at 7:02 pm
It’s nice that the dems like to have it both ways. I heard Bernake say today that the bailouts didn’t cost taxpayers a penny. Yet Boxer says that taxpayers “saved” the companies. I am sick of liberal greed.
2 Peter // Feb 12, 2010 at 10:05 am
Chad,
It’s politics.
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