Here’s the first sentence in today’s lead article on the Times website:
President Obama vowed to try to stop the faltering insurance giant American International Group from paying out hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to executives, as the administration scrambled to avert a populist backlash against banks and Wall Street that could complicate Mr. Obama’s economic recovery agenda.
I have previously noted the Times’s tendency to cite “populists” or “populism” as the motivation behind calls for putting limits on Wall Street executives’ pay. It annoys me to no end when journalists and commentators portray calls for lower bonuses for our failure executives as if it’s all about President Obama pandering to some crazed “populist” masses in order to get to the real work of fixing the economy. I’m not going to go through all the arguments I already made regarding reining in executive pay on Wall Street (see above link), suffice it to say that Americans have a right to call for some equity in this matter if we feel like it, since AIG is on life support on our dime. If these guys had done their job in the first place, we wouldn’t be the ones signing their checks. And as long as we are, we have the inherent right to call for a reasonable level of compensation for these terrible, subsidized employees. For once, I can understand all the complaints about government workers.
On another tack, many readers will probably recall the famous 1996 welfare reform law that placed onerous restrictions on who could receive welfare. Republicans were overjoyed by this legislation, bragging in a United States Senate Republican Policy Committee memo from August 1999 that their successes included:
So it’s great to kick poor people who don’t have anything to fall back on off the welfare rolls, but when we’re handing out welfare to the rich, questioning million dollar bonuses is populist madness. I see…
AIG would not exist and the executives in question would not have jobs if they weren’t on welfare provided by us. That’s much better than anything we ever offered poor welfare recipients. They had to go find jobs at McDonald’s or be kicked off the rolls. But when it comes to Wall Street execs, we not only pay them lavish salaries despite their repeated failure to do their jobs properly, but we also actually provide them with the same jobs that they would have otherwise lost due to their own incompetence. Uncle Sam never payed off a Mickey D’s manager when Julio got fired for spilling fry grease and burning down the entire restaurant. He’s living on the streets now. But if you do something thousands of times more destructive than that, we’ll pay for you to keep your job and even allow you to debate on whether or not you’ll get a bonus. Sweet.
But if you ask me, not allowing these execs to get bonuses is really a question of personal dignity. If we simply give out millions of dollars to these failures, it’s like saying, “Don’t worry. We know you can’t provide for yourself. Uncle Sam will give you some spending money and tuck you in at night. Everything will be fine.” But how will they ever learn to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps in this Marxist vision of utopia?
Frankly, I’m surprised that these titans of capitalism don’t refuse all wages provided by the government, as such a move is supporting socialism, which every trader I’ve ever me it vehemently opposed to. It’s like when it benefits them to get welfare, they’re for it, but when welfare benefits the poor, they’re against it. Gosh, I wouldn’t like to say these guys have no integrity, that they’re only motivation is greed, that they’re utterly untrustworthy, that they’re not even good at what they’re supposedly experts at, but that’s the only conclusion I can draw given the facts.
If anything, Obama should throw those executives out in the street like the dogs they are and give their houses to homeless former poor-person welfare recipients. That would be populism. Cutting out the bonuses, that’s nothing but old school Republican philosophy getting turned on its head.
