Democrats and Republicans are vying for the high ground on the AIG imbroglio. Here’s a scorecard as I see it.<\/p>\n
1. Democratic Senator Chris Dodd fumbled by pulling safeguards out of the stimulus bill that would have prevented the mega-bonuses. He’s in political trouble already and this doesn’t help.<\/p>\n
2. This situation heightens concerns about Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who has so far failed to live up to the ‘best and brightest’ standard set by President Obama.<\/p>\n
3. In practical terms, Democrats have found a way to fix the problem, by levying a 90% tax on big bonuses paid to executives at government-subsidized companies.<\/p>\n
4. Republicans are struggling mightily with that practical solution<\/a>, because a) it offers Dems a way off the hook and b) it uses taxes to solve a problem.<\/p>\n 5. Conservatives are now ideologically divided on the issue, with some insisting that AIG should be free to pay its execs whatever the company wants<\/a> (that’s capitalism, folks) and others voting with the Dems to claw back the cash<\/a>.<\/p>\n In the short term, the AIG mess hurts Democrats, who benefited mightily from AIG campaign contributions.<\/p>\n But in the long term, if Dems show that they’re flexible and practical enough to fix problems like this, they emerge relatively unscathed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Democrats and Republicans are vying for the high ground on the AIG imbroglio. Here’s a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[10],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}