HAPLESS FEDERAL CONTROL WON'T WORK

The story that follows might actually be considered farcical were it not so un-American, anti free market and socialist if not communist leaning in its reach.

Let's start at the beginning. Can anyone, anywhere name anything that the wrong headed legislator for life Barney Frank has ever created or run that, in the end, was a success? Short answer: not! So why should anyone of good judgment pay the least bit of attention to some hair brained scheme he devises to put government in charge of the private sector?

Also consider the Congress. These folks have trouble getting anything straight. They will vehemently oppose a war they voted to initiate. They will grant bonuses to government funded private companies within the language of their own legislation and later raise the roof because that language was applied and those bonus payments were made. They build walls between American intelligence agencies only to tear them down at a later date. They will authorize billions of dollars in lobby driven spending while decrying those same earmarks to all the news cameras. The Keystone Cops had their act together to a much higher degree than the Congress ever has. Are these the clowns that any rational person would want in control of what every employee in a corporation is allowed to earn?

Than there is the federal government itself. How well does it do when put in charge of important activities? Wasn't our own intelligence community that got the WMD information exactly wrong? How did our federal agencies initially do with the Katrina disaster? How well does the IRS police the tax cheats among our elites? Has our government been doing what could be considered an even adequate job of policing our southern border? How goes our Social Security system? What about medicare? We all know the answers to these and an endless list of similar questions.

Given such realities, this Barney Frank proposal is truly a brain dead idea for anyone outside of government. More bureaucracy is not the solution, it has been and always will be the ever growing problem. Waste, fraud and abuse are what government grows. Special interests and identity groups, not regular working American families, tend to be the greatest benefactors of this kind of federal interference into the private sector.

Government control smacks of socialism and history has repeatedly shown that socialism and it's cousin communism have never succeeded. It never will.


Beyond AIG: A Bill to let Big Government Set Your Salary
By Byron York Chief Political Correspondent

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., left, talks with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, right, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, on Capitol Hill Tuesday, March 24,2009. Frank's committee has passed a bill giving Geithner extensive control over salaries of employees working at companies receiving government bailout funds. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)It was nearly two weeks ago that the House of Representatives, acting in a near-frenzy after the disclosure of bonuses paid to executives of AIG, passed a bill that would impose a 90 percent retroactive tax on those bonuses. Despite the overwhelming 328-93 vote, support for the measure began to collapse almost immediately. Within days, the Obama White House backed away from it, as did the Senate Democratic leadership. The bill stalled, and the populist storm that spawned it seemed to pass.
But now, in a little-noticed move, the House Financial Services Committee, led by chairman Barney Frank, has approved a measure that would, in some key ways, go beyond the most draconian features of the original AIG bill. The new legislation, the "Pay for Performance Act of 2009," would impose government controls on the pay of all employees -- not just top executives -- of companies that have received a capital investment from the U.S. government. It would, like the tax measure, be retroactive, changing the terms of compensation agreements already in place. And it would give Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner extraordinary power to determine the pay of thousands of employees of American companies.
The purpose of the legislation is to "prohibit unreasonable and excessive compensation and compensation not based on performance standards," according to the bill's language. That includes regular pay, bonuses -- everything -- paid to employees of companies in whom the government has a capital stake, including those that have received funds through the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP, as well as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The measure is not limited just to those firms that received the largest sums of money, or just to the top 25 or 50 executives of those companies. It applies to all employees of all companies involved, for as long as the government is invested. And it would not only apply going forward, but also retroactively to existing contracts and pay arrangements of institutions that have already received funds.
In addition, the bill gives Geithner the authority to decide what pay is "unreasonable" or "excessive." And it directs the Treasury Department to come up with a method to evaluate "the performance of the individual executive or employee to whom the payment relates."
The bill passed the Financial Services Committee last week, 38 to 22, on a nearly party-line vote. (All Democrats voted for it, and all Republicans, with the exception of Reps. Ed Royce of California and Walter Jones of North Carolina, voted against it.)
The legislation is expected to come before the full House for a vote this week, and, just like the AIG bill, its scope and retroactivity trouble a number of Republicans. "It's just a bad reaction to what has been going on with AIG," Rep. Scott Garrett of New Jersey, a committee member, told me. Garrett is particularly concerned with the new powers that would be given to the Treasury Secretary, who just last week proposed giving the government extensive new regulatory authority. "This is a growing concern, that the powers of the Treasury in this area, along with what Geithner was looking for last week, are mind boggling," Garrett said.
Rep. Alan Grayson, the Florida Democrat who wrote the bill, told me its basic message is "you should not get rich off public money, and you should not get rich off of abject failure." Grayson expects the bill to pass the House, and as we talked, he framed the issue in a way to suggest that virtuous lawmakers will vote for it, while corrupt lawmakers will vote against it.
"This bill will show which Republicans are so much on the take from the financial services industry that they're willing to actually bless compensation that has no bearing on performance and is excessive and unreasonable," Grayson said. "We'll find out who are the people who understand that the public's money needs to be protected, and who are the people who simply want to suck up to their patrons on Wall Street."
After the AIG bonus tax bill was passed, some members of the House privately expressed regret for having supported it and were quietly relieved when the White House and Senate leadership sent it to an unceremonious death. But populist rage did not die with it, and now the House is preparing to do it all again.

Byron York, The Examiner’s chief political correspondent, can be contacted at byork@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blog posts can be read daily at ExaminerPolitics.com.

Sphere: Related Content