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.

Henry Paulson may just be the only person in this country who can solve the nation’s economic problems if there are any.  Paulson’s ambitious plan to help out Wall Street sounds like exactly what this country needs.

For the small sum of between $700,000,000,000 and $1,000,000,000,000 the federal government will help both American and foreign banks recap their losses resulting from some unfortunate decisions and bad loans.

The main thing to remember here is we all deserve a second chance.  While some of these companies may have been a tad foolish with their money, there’s no reason they should be punished for it.  Who hasn’t bounced a check or got hit by a late fee?

The democrats want to put back all the regulation that John McCain fought so hard to remove.  They think that just because they spend $1,000,000,000 they should have some right to call the shots.  All I know is when you give somebody money you don’t attach strings to it.

The best part is we could get some of this money back if some of these bad debts get repaid.  I was worried that the government might want to “bail out” private homeowners as well.  Fortunately, Paulson put my mind at ease when he commented Sunday morning that just because home buyers bit off more than they can chew, “they still need to live up to their obligations”

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.

John McCain hasn’t been afraid to run a maverick campaign this year taking on his own party when he felt it was in the wrong.  Today, tensions escalated even higher when McCain took on himself.  These two have a longstanding grudge and this campaign has only seemed to exacerbate things.

Things reached a boiling point when Senator McCain called on the Federal Reserve to get out of the business of bail outs. “The Federal Reserve should get back to its core business of responsibly managing our money supply and inflation,” the Arizona senator told a group of business leaders in Wisconsin, an electoral battleground state.

McCain went on to decry this corporate welfare which he feels is not only unnecessary, but damaging to the economy.    This has never been the business of the Federal Reserve nor should it be.

This statement evidently rankled McCain who said of the AIG bailouts, “There are literally millions of people whose retirement, whose investment, whose insurance were at risk here. They were going to have their lives destroyed because of the greed and excess and corruption.”  In supporting the bailouts, McCain saw them as the only way to keep the problems of Wall Street from doing serious harm to Main Street.

I have no problem with McCain taking himself on, but I want to remind McCain that he has a long history of service to this country and as a POW I would hope that McCain can avoid using personal attacks against himself.  This Fall I hope the voters will be given a clear choice to pick the McCain they want based on which set of his principles they most support.  This is change that we can believe in unless of course we decide that change is not one of those principles we support.

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.

I love to see a leadership with a positive attitude and John McCain is bullish on the future.  Today in Orlando John McCain made it very clear that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.”  Sure, we’ve got major financial institutions collapsing and Americans lost $500,000,000,000 today alone in the stock market.  However, you can’t help but feel that with McCain in the White House prosperity is right around the corner.

McCain is ably advised by a cadre of the brightest economic minds the Republican party has to offer.  Yesterday, one of his advisers Donald Luskin had a great op-ed piece in the Washington Post where he slices and dices Obama’s crackpot idea that the economy isn’t as strong as it ever was.  He shows that the US economy grew by 3.3 percent this quarter which is right on the mark (Way to go guys!)

McCain’s chief economic adviser is Phil Gramm who was one of the leading architects of the deregulation effort in the banking industry.  As a Texas senator, Gramm helped write the law that relaxed the nation’s banking rules.Then, after leaving the Senate, Gramm became an executive and lobbyist for the Swiss banking giant UBS — at a time when banks were fighting to loosen rules against predatory lending.  If anybody has the knowledge to fix things in banking its Phil Gramm.

McCain himself is no economic slouch. The man has 9 homes and a private jet himself. You don’t make that kind of jack without having some kind economic knowledge. When he was first elected Senator he was instrumental in helping Charles Keating and Lincoln Savings and Loans with troublesome regulation.

Sure McCain may say he’s no expert on economics, but that’s just McCain being McCain. McCain is bullish on America and we know bull when we see it. Come November we’ll be singing “Happy Days are Here Again.”