As the furor over AIG bonuses continues, the rhetoric form Washington has intensified. Today The Weasel Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and others have called on AIG employees who received bonuses to return them to the company and/or the government. They went on to warn these individuals that the government might seek to tax the individuals receiving the bonuses at such a high level that the government would recover most if not all of the bonus income.
You can think AIG is evil and all of its employees deserve this kind of treatment if you want. But be careful what you wish for. Today its AIG, tomorrow it might be your employer. And while most of us feel completely removed from the so-called excesses on Wall Street… you have to wonder what’s next.
Are you really going to accept the government correcting mistakes (that they were apart of) by taxing people to death? Is it really American to score political points and seek vengeance through new, retroactive tax policy?
I’m not thrilled with AIG nor its performance before or after the bailouts began. But that’s why you don’t bail them out. If you didn’t want AIG to pay its contractual obligations, then you should have allowed them to go into bankruptcy (sounds good for GM and Chrysler too). But when you don’t allow them to go into bankruptcy, then you have to accept the consequences… which include the organization fulfilling its contractual agreements. But either way, you don’t punish a company or individuals by stealing their income through targeted tax policy.
Every American should be afraid. Get past your anger about the bailouts and AIG and think about the ramifications of this. If The Weasel Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, the White House and others don’t mind publicly discussing creating punitive tax policies to get people for supposed transgressions… what kind of additional threats are they discussing privately and on whom? Should Pro-Life citizens worry about the tax policies they will face with a Pro-Choice President in the White House? Should Conservatives worry about IRS threats with a Liberal running the show? It doesn’t matter what your group or affiliation is… when your association or employer becomes out of favor and its politically advantageous to attack you… watch your back. The Weasel Chuck Schumer and the White House are now readily admitting what many of us have always known… the tax code is one of the most powerful weapons in the government’s arsenal to settle a score.
Now matter how egregious AIG’s mistakes were… if we allow the tax code to publicly be used as a weapon to attack past mistakes, then every American needs to fear our government and its most powerful weapon, the IRS.
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