Measure would place a 90 percent tax on some bailout related bonusesWASHINGTON - Denouncing a "squandering of the people's money," lawmakers voted decisively Thursday to impose a 90 percent tax on millions of dollars in employee bonuses paid by troubled insurance giant AIG and other bailed-out companies.
The House vote was 328-93. The Senate is taking a slightly different approach. It's considering a 35 percent excise tax on the companies paying the bonuses and a 35 percent tax on the employees getting them.
President Barack Obama has signaled general support for the concept.
"I look forward to receiving a final product that will serve as a strong signal to the executives who run these firms that such compensation will not be tolerated," the president said in a statement.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif, told colleagues, "We want our money back now for the taxpayers. It isn't that complicated."
Contentious battle
The outcome may not have been complicated. But the lopsided vote failed to reflect the contentious political battle that preceded it.
Republicans took Democrats to task for rushing to tax AIG bonuses worth an estimated $165 million after the majority party stripped from last month's economic stimulus bill a provision that could have banned such payouts.
"This political circus that's going on here today with this bill is not getting to the bottom of the questions of who knew what and when did they know it," said House Republican Leader John Boehner of Ohio.
He voted "no," but 85 fellow Republicans joined 243 Democrats in voting "yes." It was opposed by six Democrats and 87 Republicans.
The bill would impose a 90 percent tax on bonuses given to employees with family incomes above $250,000 at American International Group and other companies that have received at least $5 billion in government bailout money. It would apply to any such bonuses issued since Dec. 31.
National firestorm
The House vote, after just 40 minutes of debate, showed how quickly Congress can act when the political will is there.
It was only this past weekend that the bailed-out insurance giant paid bonuses totaling $165 million to employees, including traders in the Financial Products unit that nearly brought about AIG's collapse.
AIG has received $182.5 billion in federal bailout money and is now 80 percent government-owned.
Disclosure of the bonuses touched off a national firestorm that both the Obama administration and Congress have scurried to contain.
During a taping of the "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno," Obama responded to the vote, saying, "I understand Congress’ frustrations, and they’re responding to, I think, everybody’s anger. But I think that the best way to handle this is to make sure that you’ve closed the door before the horse gets out of the barn."
And in a statement issued by the White House late Thursday, Obama said the House action "rightly reflects the outrage that so many feel over the lavish bonuses that AIG provided its employees at the expense of the taxpayers who have kept this failed company afloat."
"In the end, this is a symptom of a larger problem — a bubble-and-bust economy that valued reckless speculation over responsibility and hard work," he said. "That is what we must ultimately repair to build a lasting and widespread prosperity."
Obama's wait-and-see
In his statement, Obama did not explicitly endorse the House bill. Instead, he was careful to take a wait-and-see attitude on the details of the final legislation while making clear that he supports the effort to get the bonus money back for taxpayers.
Topic No. 1 raised by Republicans during the House debate was the last-minute altering of a provision in Obama's $787 billion stimulus law to cap executive compensation for firms receiving government bailouts.
The measure might have forestalled payment of the AIG bonuses.
But Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat and the author of the provision, says the administration insisted that he modify his proposal so that it would only apply to payments agreed to in the future.
That, critics claim, cleared the way for the AIG payouts.
"The idea came from the administration," Dodd said Thursday
Dodd said he was not aware of any AIG bonuses at the time the change was made.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner confirmed such conversations with Dodd. He said the administration was worried about possible legal challenges to the provision.
"We expressed concern about this specific version," Geithner said in an interview with CNN. "But we also worked with him to strengthen the overall bill."
The treasury secretary, who has been criticized for not learning of the AIG bonus payments sooner since he helped orchestrate the bailout last year as president of the New York Fed, said anew in the interview that he was not informed of the bonuses until last week.
"And as soon as I heard about the full scale of these things, we moved very actively to explore every possible legal avenue to address this problem," Geithner said.
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Topic: House passes bill taxing AIG, other bonuses (Read 562 times)