United Liberty
Firms Affected by 90% Tax Voted on by House
Fri, 03/20/2009 - 12:01pm | posted by Jason Pye
The House voted and passed (328 to 93) yesterday a 90% tax on bonuses funded through bailouts:
The House was to vote Thursday on a bill that would place a 90 percent federal tax on bonuses paid to employees with family incomes above $250,000. The targeted tax would hit bonus recipient at companies that have received at least $5 billion in government money.“We figured that the local and state governments would take care of the other 10 percent,” said Rep. Charles Rangel of New York, chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee.
Rangel said the bill would apply to mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac but exclude community banks and other smaller companies that have received less bailout money. The mortgage companies also have received extensive government aid.
There are constitutional arguments (ex post facto, bill of attainder and right to contract) against this type of punitive action, but they were ignored.
What companies are hurt by the 90% tax passed by the House?:
The new bonus tax passed by the House today will apply a 90% rate to bonuses paid at firms that have taken over $5 billion from the TARP. While hundreds of banks and other companies have received capital injections from the TARP, only a dozen have taken enough to get hit by this restriction.If the bill becomes law, here are the 12 firms that would be hit.
- Citigroup (New York)
- JPMorgan Chase (New York)
- Wells Fargo & Co. (San Francisco)
- Bank of America Corp. (Charlotte, N.C.)
- Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (New York)
- Merrill Lynch & Co. (New York)
- Morgan Stanley (New York)
- PNC Financial Services Group Inc. (Pittsburgh)
- US Bancorp (Minneapolis)
- AIG (New York)
- General Motors (Detroit)
- GMAC Financial Service (New York)
I’d really like to see this overturned by the courts.
The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates.
“In this free nation we do not choose to be ruled, we elect to be governed.”
— Barry Goldwater
This is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong! I think it is a disgrace what they have done, but that doesn’t mean I can go and break the law. The second they bailed AIG they opened a can of worms that crawled right out of the system and into the fast lane of disaster, but then AIG should never have grown so big that they can take the world economy down either. From the moment they handed that money over, so to speak, all contracts were made live and therefore all bonuses legal and binding. The whole lot is down to those who control world trade; the governments and world banks. Thousands saw those CDS values rocketing beyond the degree of sense that I can’t get a true figure for - anything between $45-500 trillion; the lowest figure is bloody ridiculous - these people should be on trial, not having their bonuses illegally taken away!
I don’t see any reason why I should be paying companies that bought these credit default swaps from AIG. They should have been more careful about buying their insurance. And if they go bankrupt because of it, so be it.
Yes, there would undoubtedly be chaos as each goes into receivership. Yet I seem to recall all of the airlines continuing to operate during their bankruptcies.
“Oh, but this is the lifeblood of the economy!!”, they’ll say. I agree. Let sound companies do this job, not fools. The sooner we get the crap cleared out, the sooner we’ll return to health.
And for god’s sake, get rid of this stupid Sarbannes Oxley thing. Its making things far worse.
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