Washington at it's worst by Gary Bauer

Yesterday’s Capitol Hill “show trial” of AIG chief executive Edward Liddy was disgusting. Of all the people in the hearing room, Liddy was the least responsible for the bonus fiasco. Liddy was asked by the feds to run AIG last fall. He works for a dollar a year. He basically took the job to help our country. Yet the finger-pointing politicians in the committee room were the same politicians who, along with the White House, rammed through the “stimulus” bill without allowing enough time to read the details – and now a $165 million “detail” has come back to bite them.

Yesterday, Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) admitted that he removed a provision from the bill that would have addressed the bonuses. And he did so after receiving a request from the Obama Administration! This admission comes after Dodd’s unequivocal denial that he had anything to do with it. And here’s something else you should know. This week, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner sent a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) promising to punish AIG for the bonuses. In his letter, Geithner wrote that AIG will have to pay back to the Treasury “the amount of the retention awards just paid.” And, “In addition, we will deduct from the $30 billion in assistance an amount equal to the amount of those payments.”

Don’t miss what has happened here. This administration and its liberal allies in Congress approved of the AIG contracts and protected them legally in the “stimulus” bill, and now they are going to “fine” AIG for obeying the law they wrote. That’s Washington at its worst! But rather than admit they caused the bonus problem, Obama and his liberal allies went back to the strategy that has worked so well so far – attack business, Wall Street, executives and fan the flames of class warfare. President Obama did his best imitation yesterday of a Latin American demagogue, telling a campaign rally in California that families earning more than $250,000 a year “can afford” his tax hikes. “It’s not like suddenly they’re going to have to go to the poor house. But what that does is it allows us to pay for health care…” Translation: Anyone who fights against higher taxes doesn’t care about the sick and suffering.

For anyone falling for this, consider this fact. If you are a family of four living in New York, California or a lot of other high tax states and you earn $250,000, after state, local and federal income, sales and property taxes, you are fortunate to have $125,000 left BEFORE Obama raises your taxes. Does anyone think those “rich” people are why we are in trouble today? British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once rightly observed, “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” That’s one lesson Washington liberals refuse to learn.