Several members of Congress are planning on taxing away the bonuses that AIG has awarded several of its top executives.

Really this is mostly ridiculous. They have contracts in place that say they owe these employees money. They have to give it to them. Yes these contracts would have been ripped to shreds if AIG had gone bankrupt, but luckily the geniuses that run our government thought it was a good idea to give them over 170 billion dollars and counting so that they could survive. Since they survived, the contracts are valid and should be paid.

The shame is that this is just a political game to distract people from how badly the government handled the whole situation. Who really cares about 160 million when you gave them 170 BILLION. It is a whopping .09% of the bailout money. Sure, it sucks that we are paying these bonuses, but it should not be the issue we are focusing on.

Really, the only problem here is that these big financial companies suck at writing contracts. Why do they have “bonuses” that are guaranteed? I can tell you with certainty that I won’t get a bonus this year if our company loses billions of dollars. Now, I don’t work at a company that has any chance of losing billions of dollars, we would all be out out on the street way before that point. The point is that the bonus only happens when the company is doing well and making money.

That is what is so confusing to me. These banks and big businesses that are losing money are still paying dividends and giving out bonuses. How does that make any sense. Dividends are a sharing of the profits among the shareholders of a company. It seems logical to me that these would only occur when there are, you know, profits.

The same goes for bonuses. A bonus is something you give an employee for a job well done. When the company is losing billions of dollars each quarter, these executives are not doing a good job. Running the entire financial system of the world into the ground does not constitute job well done. So why in the world would the write contracts that give guaranteed bonuses? If that is the case, just put the money into their salaries. There is no reason to call it a bonus.

While I think the bonuses are stupid on the part of these companies, it is really only a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the mess that is these bailouts.

What do you think about the bonuses? What do you think about the political circus around them? Should we be focusing on getting this money back in taxes, or is this just a political game to distract people from how poorly Washington has handled the bailouts? Let me know what you think in the comments below.

CNN ran a story about a young girl whose school was crumbling and falling apart. All she wanted was to have a quality place to be educated. In her desperation she penned a letter to lawmakers that ended up in the Oval Office and netted her a seat at the “State of the Nation” (Not Union?) address next to First Lady Michelle Obama. She was thrilled with the news that the stimulus plan would have money that could be used to help schools like hers. That is, until she found out that the EVIL Mark Sanford, Governor of her state (South Carolina), was refusing the stimulus money because Washington would not allow him to use it to pay down the state’s debt. I feel like watching the media villanize fiscal conservatives is becoming a new national past-time, move over baseball.

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As I read through this morning news I saw an interesting snippet regarding President Obama’s talk with the President of Brazil in the Oval Office. The interesting thing was his joke that:

“You know, I would love a trip to the Amazon. I suspect that the Republican Party would love to see me travel through the Amazon and maybe get lost.”

Perhaps I’m unique in this way but I think we are probably better off with Obama than Biden or, God forbid, a “President Pelosi”. Any thoughts? Would the GOP be happy to see Biden replace Obama?

Oregon currently has a bill in the House to have a state run marijuana production facility. Medical marijuana is already legal in Oregon, and they want to have more control over the substance. They say some of the current “growers” are selling it illegally and being targeted by crime. If the law is passed, the state will impose a $98 per ounce tax on the pot.

I am not really for socialism, I would much rather they let private enterprise take care of growing and selling the weed, but I am all for taxing it. In a recent article I talked about some of the reasons to legalize marijuana, and increasing government revenues from that taxes on it would be a huge plus. This bill doesn’t legalize it, but it might be a step towards that. Even crazier than state grown marijuana, the bill seems to have bi-partisan support. There’s something you don’t see every day.

Let me know what you think about this bill and check out my reasons for legalizing marijuana in the previous article.

Ron Paul is a generally a pretty smart guy. I agree with a lot of the things he says. I like the idea of limited federal government. Fiscal conservatism. Free-market capitalism. These are all great things that I generally agree with Ron Paul on. So now I have a question for him. Why in the world do you put your name next to so many earmarks?
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You want to know why the rich get richer? It is because they work hard. It is because they have worked hard. It is because they are smart. It isn’t because everything is stacked in their favor, no matter how much you want to believe that.

Here is an excerpt from a post called 3 Reasons Why the Rich Continue to Get Richer by a 14 year old blogger that understands the world better than most adults:

One of the growing concerns of middle class families everywhere is why they are stuck in the same income zone, while the rich, or the upper class, continue to move up. Over time, this has been labeled a “problem” by politicians, and while it very honestly isn’t, many of them are using this to promote contempt towards the rich. They want people to believe that most of these people don’t deserve to be richer, which is exactly the opposite of what I believe.

His final reason that the rich get richer is because they make their own decisions. They don’t rely on the media to tell them what to think. The don’t rely on some government stimulus package filled with pork to save them. They don’t worry about getting “Hope and Change” from Obama. They don’t need his hope flavored sprinkles. They make their own using hard work.

That is something that is foreign to a lot of Obama supporters. Not all mind you, many of them work hard. However, far too many think that the government is supposed to be everything for everybody. That is not the government’s job. The government just needs to stay out of my way so that they don’t hold me back as I try to be successful. I don’t need their help, and I certainly don’t want them to take hard earned money from somebody else to give to me. That is not the American Dream. That is the American Nightmare. Somebody please wake me up.

Here in the great state of Tennessee we recently had a news organization publish a list  of / link to the information publicly available on the Internet containing the details of individuals who possess a handgun carry permit. This has caused quite a bit of outrage from permit holders who either didn’t believe this information was openly available or who believe that most people would not be able to find the information so easily if not for this news agency making it easier. Permit holders are especially concerned about what the effects of this public data may be.

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What is the flat tax rate plan for income taxes? It is a much more fair way of taxing people than the current progressive tax. It is a competing idea with the fair tax as a replacement for the current joke that is our tax code. The flat tax is a single percentage that everyone would have to pay. Under the proposal by former Congressman Dick Armey, that rate would be 17%.
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