New Bill To Make CEOs Pay Back Bonuses

From those guardians of the US treasury at the Associated Press:

Olympia Snow

Measure Would Require Bailed-Out CEOs to Pay Taxpayers Back for Big Bonuses

WASHINGTON — Financial institutions that received federal bailout money and paid large executive bonuses would be required to compensate taxpayers under the economic stimulus bill approved by the Senate.

The $838 billion measure includes an amendment penalizing companies that paid bonuses greater than $100,000 to executives after receiving government rescue funds last year. The amendment would require the companies to repay within four months any portion of the bonus above $100,000 or face an excise tax of 35 percent on the portion of the bonus above $100,000…

"It should have gone without saying that the bailout money was never intended for employee bonuses, but once again financial institutions have taken advantage of lax regulation and the public trust," said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who co-sponsored the amendment with Sen. Olympia Snow, R-Maine…

Snowe, one of just three Republicans to back the stimulus bill, said the financial bailout Congress approved last fall "left open an escape hatch of golden parachutes for top executives on Wall Street, the same individuals whose careless mistakes hurt the financial system and forced taxpayers to foot the bill in the first place." …

The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that the Wyden-Snowe amendment would raise as much as $3.2 billion. Financial institutions received more than $274 billion through the bailout program while paying out an estimated $18.4 billion in employee bonuses last year, the committee said.

This class warfare populist bill is not so remarkable in itself. It is just another step along the way to a command economy. (A system that has worked so well everywhere it has been tried.)

But what is more striking is how it demonstrates one of our watchdog media’s favorite motifs.

When money is flowing out of the US treasury, it is described as coming from the government. Never the taxpayers.

But when money is being “paid back” by greedy corporations or their evil CEOs, it is always paid back to the “taxpayers.”

Which is odd, considering that the money that goes out definitely comes out of our pockets.

Yet somehow the money that is paid back to taxpayers never quite makes it to us.

Why is that?

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