Another silly piece of legislation that our favorite silly Senator has up her sleeve:
I want to let you know about the Taxpayer Fairness Act (S.2994), which Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) and I recently introduced in the Senate. Our bill would impose a tax on large bonuses paid by Wall Street banks and other firms that benefited from billions of dollars of taxpayer assistance in 2009.
Last year, to avert a financial collapse, taxpayers saved a number of companies that were considered “too big to fail.” 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 Taxpayer Fairness Act levies a 50 percent taxpayer fairness fee on any bonus in excess of $400,000 paid by firms that took $5 billion or more in TARP funds. Only bonuses received in 2009 would be affected, since this was a year when the very survival of these institutions depended on government support. The revenues generated would be used to reduce the deficit or to help the nation recover from the recession.
Although the reckless behavior of major Wall Street firms helped lead to the financial crisis, they have benefited greatly from the response to that crisis. Today we face an enormous budget challenge rooted in the economic impact of the financial crisis. We should ask the most highly paid employees of those institutions to pay their fair share in helping us meet this challenge.
The Taxpayer Fairness Act is a reasonable, common-sense bill. At a time when so many American families are struggling, it is only fair to ask those who are benefiting from exorbitant bonuses to help pay back the taxpayers whose assistance made their very survival possible.
My response to The Punisher:
What I find very interesting about how you guys in D.C. work is that no one seems to ever ask voters if they are interested in some of the silliness that comes out of Congress.
Don’t you think it’s ironic that you plan to pass (YET MORE) needless legislation to tax bonuses as punishment to companies who accepted money THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT threw at them? What are you thinking? Where is the logic in this? And what business is it of yours to determine how much someone in the private sector should earn? This is the intrusive-government shibboleth writ large, complete with moral contradictions.
I disapprove of your efforts to redistribute wealth under the guise of punishing “bad guys.”
I would heartily approve of any effort you can muster to decrease wasteful government spending. The tax base is already massive. I’d have more respect for you if you could contribute to a good old-fashioned practice: living within one’s means