Congress again making a bad situation worse

Like almost everyone I know, I was a bit angry at AIG for paying out $165 million in bonuses. But, what really caused me to flame-out over this issue is how the “benevolent” ruling class in Congress feigned shock and amazement that AIG had given out the bonuses especially considering that they had known about them several weeks before they were paid.

Sen. Chris Dodd inserted a provision in the economic stimulus package that protected these bonuses then he denied that he had done it and finally, yesterday, admitted that he did. Do you suppose that Dodd’s loophole had anything to do with the $103,000 in donations he received from AIG?

Next, Barney Frank jumped in and demanded that AIG’s CEO make public a list of private citizens who got the bonuses. Has Barney ever read the U.S. Constitution? This is a flagrant violation of the right to privacy guaranteed by our Constitution.

If all this isn’t enough, Congress is actually proposing to use the tax law to punish those individual citizens who received the bonuses. Regardless of how reprehensible these bonuses are, they are not illegal. Using the government to attack a private citizen engaged in a legal, albeit idiotic, activity is a violation of their constitutional rights. Want the bonuses back? Let AIG go bankrupt. A bankruptcy judge can and will, in private, demand those bonuses get returned. By the way, did anyone know that Obama received $101,000 in donations from AIG? I doubt he’ll give his “bonus” back.

BERT WALLIS

Sagle