That’s Right Nate

Much of the AIG bonuses will go towards family expenses like cars for their children to get to school.

The American dream is in jeopardy.   Imagine what it is like to work long days and longer weeks in the hopes of getting a bonus to help get you by in lean economic times.   Now imagine that congress uses the power to tax in order to take all that money away from you simply because they resent your success.  The power to tax is the power to destroy and the Democrats in congress have no trouble wielding this power.  It is enough to make successful people simply “go Galt” and refuse to work.  Afterall, they won’t see the fruits of their own labor.  Such is the plight for dozens of employees of AIG.

American, a country which used to aspire to the success of its elite, now resents it.   Let me tell you about these bonuses.  Companies like AIG have to pay these large bonuses in order to get the top people to work for them.  Without a million dollar bonus or retention payment or whatever you want to call it, many of these guys would just go into social work or teaching.  Companies pay these bonuses because that is the cost of doing business requires it.  Its just unfortunate that since the taxpayers are paying that cost, we have to pay the bonuses.  These bonuses will help stimulate the economy though.  They represent a potential $165,000,000 in sports cars, caviar, private planes, and luxury yachts.

And how does congress react?  Well according to Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY), “My colleagues and I are sending a letter to [AIG CEO Edward] Liddy informing him that he can go right ahead and tell the employees that are scheduled to get bonuses that they should voluntarily return them,” Sen. Charles Schumer said on the Senate floor. “Because if they don’t, we plan to tax virtually all of [the money] … so it is returned to its rightful owners, the taxpayers.”

His fellow Democrat Bill Nelson of Florida chimed in by calling for a 90% excise tax on the bonuses, but it isn’t just the Democrats who seem to have problems with successful hard working men and women.   Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) took an even more extreme position, “But I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they’d follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide.”

The AIG executives will get their hard earned bonuses and they will spend them, but I can promise you they won’t enjoy it.  Caviar and champagne just aren’t the same when somebody has killed your appetite.

John McCain has a plan.  One of the greatest crises facing this generation is Social Security and John McCain has a strategy for fixing it, but you never would hear about it from the mainstream media.  They’re too busy carrying Barack Obama’s attacks against John McCain.  The man was a POW for God’s sake.

McCain’s plan is two parts.  As he explains it, “Look, what Americans need is some straight talk. Every man, woman and child in America needs to know it’s going broke, and we’ve got to do the hard things. We’ve got to fix it for the future generations of Americans. Don’t we owe that to young Americans today? I say we do. It’s got to be bipartisan. And you have to go to the American people and say we won’t raise your taxes. We need personal savings accounts, but we got to fix this system.”

By allowing Americans to invest their money in the stock market, you give them the knowledge that their investments are protected and bringing them a larger rate of return except in the unlikely event that for some reason the stock market declines.  Still the stock market historically rises quite rapidly.  If I had invested just $24,000 in September of 1984 in AIG,   I would have seen my retirement fund worth $701,300 in October of 2007.   You can’t get that kind of growth in the Social Security Trust Fund the way its set up now.

Now for step two.   All John McCain has to do is fix the underfunding without raising taxes or cutting entitlements and we can begin investing our social security benefits into the stock market and seeing some real growth from our retirement accounts.  I can hardly wait.

America has lost one-trillion dollars worth of wealth in the last 3 days and we all just spent $283 a piece plus interest to bail out AIG.  The economic crisis of the last few days crystalizes our need for strong economic leadership, but Barack Obama has no economic position.  He has one on his website, but that requires an awful lot of reading.  If he had a decent position he’d be able to condense it down to a couple of words like “Drill baby drill.”

While Obama can’t seem to get an economic position together, McCain is able to actively hold two at the same time.  This is something very few economists could pull off.  McCain believes the biggest two threats to the economy are unregulated businesses playing fast and loose with money and needing to get bailed out by the taxpayers and also government regulation getting in the way of those businesses.

John McCain had fiery words this week in Tampa, “Government has a clear responsibility to act in defense of the public interest, and that’s exactly what I intend to do.  In my administration, we’re going to hold people on Wall Street responsible. And we’re going to enact and enforce reforms to make sure that these outrages never happen in the first place.”

John McCain also said, “Our financial market approach should include encouraging increased capital in financial institutions by removing regulatory, accounting, and tax impediments to raising capital.”

McCain is the kind of maverick who is willing to stand up and say “I’m a deregulator at heart.” and swear to his supporters that he will not let “these kind of abuses go uncorrected or punished.”  Most candidates have a hard time taking one side strongly on an issue, but McCain has boldly taken two.  In his White House we will see a government that is clearly for getting out of business’s way as we impose more regulation on them.  This is change you can believe in no matter what your beliefs may be.